URBANISM MEETS ART : Socioplastics as Epistemic Mesh * Relational Architecture as Infrastructural Ethics

In the epistemic complexity of Anto Lloveras’s socioplastics, architecture emerges not as a disciplinary specialty but as a relational fulcrum through which knowledge, affect and territory are distributed across a mesh of interlinked practices. What is staged in the Socioplastics System is neither a corpus of discrete works nor a linear artistic career, but a distributed ontology in which built forms, precarious gestures and symbolic economies co-author an unstable archive. The central hub refracts fifteen years of durational practice into a performative infrastructure, where one hundred master works—ranging from hyperplastic fireworks to monochromatic satellites—interweave with one hundred and eighty curatorial series such as RECREO and LIMINALITY. Here, relationality operates as a critical operator that displaces objectual authority in favour of epistemic saturation. The archive metabolises contingency into ethical entanglement, transforming the museum from a site of stabilisation into a porous membrane for circulation and resonance. Architecture, in this context, is no longer the art of enclosing space but the art of structuring relations: a prosthetic device for symbolic exchange that binds bodies, texts and territories into a single socioplastic ecology. Lloveras’s practice thus radicalises post-objectual tendencies by reprogramming authorship, temporality and pedagogy into distributed agencies, where meaning is generated not through synthesis but through nodal proliferation.

This nodal logic becomes explicit in channels such as Urbanas and Lapieza Art Series, which function as differentiated organs within the mesh. Urbanas, developed in dialogue with Paula Lloveras, reframes the city as a relational canvas in which architectural poetics and civic reconfiguration converge. Here, urban space is treated as a performative archive, an anthropomorphised metropolis whose fragile anatomies register affective geometries and decolonial imaginaries. Lapieza Art Series, by contrast, constitutes the phenomenological backbone of the system, condensing one hundred and eighty series and over two thousand two hundred pieces into a paradigmatic practice of relational art. Founded in 2009, it evolves from room-laboratories in Madrid to ruralist archipelagos, privileging slowness, ritual and distributed agency over spectacle. Together, these nodes redistribute epistemic weight across the mesh, transforming provisional architectures into operative substrates that negotiate thresholds between local agency and institutional parasitism. The architectural here is not formal but infrastructural: it is the structuring of relational conditions under which symbolic economies can breathe through precarious materiality. In this sense, Lloveras’s work extends Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics into a more radical terrain, where relationality is no longer an intersubjective encounter but an ethical operating system.

The epistemic ambition of socioplastics is further intensified through peripheral yet constitutive nodes such as Tomoto Daga, YouTube Breakfast, Otra Capa and Hola Verde Urbano. Tomoto Daga manifests as an alter-identity that fractures authorship into photographic traces of installations, where images function as co-archivists rather than documents. Phantom displacements, botanical entanglements and provisional architectures converge here into a visual grammar of contingency, amplifying the precariousness that underpins the entire system. YouTube Breakfast, by contrast, operates as a non-linear video classroom in which pedagogy unfolds as durational performance. Its rhizomatic streams transform digital flows into affective geometries, where hermeneutic inquiry, ritual repetition and everyday reflection sediment into a distributed curriculum of care. Otra Capa provides the hermeneutic membrane of the mesh, layering interpretation upon interpretation and refracting relational contingencies through lenses of decolonial temporality and infrastructural politics. Hola Verde Urbano completes this constellation by introducing a botanical epistemology in which moss, sediments and wild flowers co-author socioplastic narratives. Ecology here is not a theme but a method: a post-human curriculum that privileges listening over production and reframes landscape as a corporeal agent in the archive.

Across these interlinked ecologies, complexity arises not from isolated summaries but from the play of entanglement itself. The Socioplastics Mesh Master Index 2026 exemplifies this distributed logic, weaving one hundred works with one hundred and eighty series into a performative ledger of resonance. Series such as EXIT and BANCAL articulate a spectrum from symbolic departure to ruralist minimalism, while biennial mediations in Lagos and Guimarães convert institutional circuits into conduits for redistributed imaginaries. What emerges is a post-objectual ethic in which architecture’s relationality plays against institutional stabilisation, fostering ecologies that breathe duration, attenuation and care. Lloveras thus radicalises both Beuys and Bourriaud by proposing socioplastics as an epistemic operating system: a form of infrastructural glue that binds affective economies to territorial ethics without resolution. In this system, art becomes a living ecology rather than a representational regime, inviting viewers into co-archival roles within an unstable, resilient and profoundly relational archive. Complexity here is not an aesthetic effect but an ethical condition, one that displaces heroic narratives in favour of collective inscriptions and reprograms institutional time through distributed gestures.