A 15-Year Trajectory of Socioplastics
What began in 2009 as a weekly mutation in a Madrid living room—a domestic laboratory where art was not exhibited but lived—has, fifteen years later, reconstituted itself as LAPIEZA-LAB: a sovereign, self-governing university of thought, complete with persistent identifiers (DOIs, RORs), machine-readable metadata, and a closed-loop epistemic architecture. This is not a simple evolution. It is a stratigraphic inversion. The trajectory from EXIT (node 001) to COPOS / THE END OF AN ERA (LAPIEZA-2200) traces the transformation of experimental relational art into explicit research infrastructure. In that transformation lies the project's singular contribution to contemporary practice: demonstrating that long-term curatorial practice can accumulate enough internal coherence to become infrastructure without abandoning its artistic nature.
Core Methodology: Socioplastics (SOCIOPLÁSTICA)
At the heart of LAPIEZA is a methodology termed Socioplastics, which draws inspiration from Joseph Beuys's social sculpture and Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics. Socioplastics treats art not as a discrete artifact but as a catalyst for social relations, seeking to increase humanistic symbolic capital within a society dominated by post-industrial commodity systems. The work is neither object-bound nor author-centric but emerges through iterative encounters, dialogic exchanges, and contingent assemblages. Using digital networks as a site for "relational insurgency," the project merges the legitimation of museum spaces with the mass diffusion of social networks, treating time as the primary material and the archive as a living organism.
The Five Epochs: A Chronological Cartography
The project's 185 series and 2,200+ nodes are organized into five distinct but continuous epochs:
I. Foundational Epoch (2009–2012): The Room as Laboratory
Born as an independent space at Palma 15 in Madrid, LAPIEZA established a weekly rhythm of mutation: a new series every Thursday. EXIT (001–010) established the primordial gesture: art as a departure from the object. BAZAR (011–019) introduced the economy of the everyday. The domestic setting challenged the white cube through sheer velocity. The numbering system emerged organically, accumulating without a master plan. Material precarity became conceptual power. Key series: MOSCA, KIWI, SOCIOPLASTICS, SALES, FIRE, BALL, PAN, FASTFORWARD. The term Socioplastics first appeared as a methodological name in 2010. The physical room closed in 2012, but the project did not end; it began its drift toward mobility.
II. Expansive Epoch (2013–2019): Nomadic Drifts and Affective Geometries
With no permanent room, LAPIEZA became a relational network and an archive in motion, traveling through Cádiz, Mexico, Croatia, Bogotá, Marseille, Oslo, Bratislava, Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Athens. Each place contributed a texture; each series translated local architectures and social energies into objectual and choreographic forms. Key series: BULLET, VULCANO, DESEO, SYSTEM, EXPANSIVO, NETA, KISS, NOWHERE (2013); ANTORCHA, GOMA, ENSAYOS POSICIONALES, STRUCTURAL CONVERSATIONS (2014); FRESH MUSEUM (801–830), a portable, post-objectual exhibition format that dissolved the border between art space and distributed publishing system (2015); SWEET CORN BRUTALISM, THE WORD (2016); ARTNATIONS (1001–1100), a global constellation of collaborative authorship (2017); FLOCK (1101–1343), coordinated movement without hierarchy (2018); THE LIGHT IN ATHENS (1344–1361), anchoring the project in the Mediterranean (2019). During this phase, the project began to understand that its seriality was not merely productive but structural.
III. Recreo Epoch (2020–2022): Slow Time and the Living Archive
The retreat to rural Ávila—provoked by the pandemic but more deeply by the project's internal need for sedimentation—introduced the concept of slow time. RECREO (1362–1469) does not mean leisure but creating again. The work became minimal, almost vegetal. The archive began to breathe. This was the decisive epistemological shift: the project started to retroactively read its own history as coherent. Key series: THE ROAD TO RESTORATION (2021), a sequence of 40 short films merging choreography with natural landscapes; BASAL, DEEP SLEEP, SOLITUDE, UNSTABLE LOVE, GREY, LA MAR (2022). The Lagos Biennial appeared as a site of activation.
IV. Biennials Epoch (2023–2024): Institutional Openings
The project re-emerged into the global scene, participating in the Lagos Biennial and Contextile Guimarães, operating as a post-institutional agency mediating between ecological networks and territorial activation. The exhibition ceased to be a closed room and became a moving field. Key series: SORROW – SO SORRY – THE GRIEF, VOYAGE VOYAGE, LOOP, RADIANCE, TAR, NATURE BOY (2023); LIMINALITY, TP7 LUGO, TEXTILE TALKS, CONFETTI (1701–1932). COPOS appeared as a major series for the first time. In 2023, the conceptual dance series DOBLE CARA (Double Face), a collaboration between Anto Lloveras and Mateo Feijoo, premiered in Madrid. Described as "a two-channel essay, a transdisciplinary experience between the domestic, the sculptural, and the still life," Doble Cara linked Beckettian minimalism, Erwin Wurm's sculptures, and Paul Preciado's philosophy, reducing the scene to fundamental elements where "each movement is similar to the previous one, never identical."
V. Ruralist Epoch (2025): The Territory as Classroom
The project moved to O Vicedo, Galicia, where the territory itself became the archive. Key series: LA LUZ EN CÁDIZ, PSICAMB, BEAUCOUP, MERCI, PARLONS CINEMA, SAN ROQUE, CLASS ACT, BRASIL, MIÑOCA, HORTUS, CUENTOS, INVERNO DE PEDRA (stone dream), ESTRUGAS E FENTOS, TURTLE VISIONS, TRAPECIO, NIGONHO, SVERIGE, BANCAL (vegetable bed), SUMMER ON/OFF, EGO TRIPS, CÁDIZ OTOÑO, and finally COPOS / THE END OF AN ERA (2181–2200).
COPOS (flakes) consists of 20 short video pieces—FARO, TERRAZA, DUCADOS, LAS PALMERAS, MIRÓ, MALLORCA, BELT, A CORUÑA, CHERRY, CHAPARRO ALGECIRAS, LOS MALAGUEÑOS, CASTILLO, STOP WORRING, JARDINERÍA ÁVILA, DÉCIMAS JERTE, SHELL, RED BÁSICA, DREAM, BOGAVANTE, MADRID—each lasting between 39 seconds and 1 minute 35 seconds. Discrete, ephemeral units that together form a larger field. The era ends not with a bang but with a scattering.
The Infrastructural Inversion: From Archive to LAPIEZA-LAB (2026)
In 2026, the project performs its most radical move: the retroactive reclassification of the entire corpus as LAPIEZA-LAB. What once appeared as an expansive constellation of more than 180 series is reconstituted as a coherent research infrastructure. The "Art Series" nomenclature is replaced by the logic of the Field Engine. The archive of 2,200 nodes is secured within a machine-readable and academically citable system through the methodical deployment of persistent identifiers, including DOIs and RORs. The material is arranged into annual English-language records on Zenodo, acquiring the formal consistency of a serial scientific publication. The twenty foundational books, the one hundred audiovisual evidence videos, and the seventeen annual Lab Reports function as mutually reinforcing layers within a single operative system. This is the inversion. The laboratory was not a plan. It was a retrospective discovery. LAPIEZA did not set out to build an infrastructure; it built one through the sheer consistency of its practice, and then, fifteen years later, recognized what it had built. The term LAB consolidates the former identity at a higher level of intelligibility. Seriality becomes method. Repetition becomes analytic depth. Curatorial practice becomes a mode of knowledge construction rather than mere exhibitionary sequencing. The archive is no longer a passive memory bank but an active analytic surface.