THE HYPERPLASTIC MANIFESTO * RELATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURES AS URBAN ONTOLOGY

The trajectory of Anto Lloveras represents a definitive departure from the static constraints of traditional architecture, moving instead toward a "hyperplastic" urbanism where the city is treated as a living, semiotic field. This ontological shift, anchored by the foundational WORK-SATELLITE, posits that the artist’s role is no longer to impose form upon matter but to mediate the flows of meaning, memory, and ritual that constitute the urban palimpsest. By conceptualising projects such as 100 FIREWORKS as "hyperplastic writing," Lloveras transforms the ephemeral spectacle into a rigorous conceptual entry point, utilizing light and gesture to navigate the friction between the monumental and the transient. This methodology suggests that the architectural act is fundamentally one of translation; it is a process of weaving relational infrastructures that bridge the gap between institutional authority and the visceral reality of the street. In this framework, the built environment is redefined not as a collection of discrete artefacts but as a continuous, malleable surface—a "socioplastic" organism that responds to the ethical and aesthetic incisions of the practitioner, thereby challenging the permanence of the urban fabric through the radical agency of the ephemeral.

Building upon this premise, the practice of "critical taxidermy," as exemplified in TAXI 1 and WORK-TAXIDERMY, functions as a surgical interrogation of the metropolitan body, cutting into the city to reveal the latent narratives of its material history. These incisions are not acts of destruction but of life-giving rupture, where the "regeneration through trauma" allows for the emergence of new urban mythologies and social commons. The work SWAN further articulates this vision by reclaiming symbolic spaces for collective memory, transforming the architectural icon into a site of citizen appropriation and mythopoetic resonance. This dialectic between the rupture of taxidermy and the connective tissue of WORK-THREADS establishes a relational ethics of space, where "threads" serve as the critical infrastructure for social repair and topological continuity. By navigating these frictions, Lloveras distances his practice from the sterile, technocratic efficiency of the modern "smart city," proposing instead an "agonistic" urbanism that prioritises epistemic friction and the political potential of the public realm over the commodification of space and the erasure of historical complexity.

The pedagogical and micrological dimensions of this work, notably articulated through WORK-BREAKFAST and PROTISTAS, underscore a paradigm shift from object-oriented production to a "rhizomatic choreography" of engagement. WORK-BREAKFAST operates as a platform for radical pedagogy, where the consumption of knowledge and the ritual of the meal converge to form a decentralized network of intellectual exchange. This is mirrored in the metabolic enquiries of PROTISTAS, which explore the "micro-ecologies" and non-human agencies that inhabit the urban periphery. Here, the artist acts as a micrologist, documenting the minimal gestures and biological flows that sustain the "fifth city"—a speculative territory where architecture meets fiction, body, and political agency. The inclusion of the RED BAG as a portable, relational icon further highlights the importance of mobility and flexibility in contemporary practice; it is a minimal device that activates social sculpture in any given context. This shift suggests that the most profound architectural interventions are often those that occur at the scale of the micro-operation, where the artist mediates the fragile balance between global infrastructure and the intimate, lived experience of the individual.

Ultimately, the consolidation of this oeuvre within the "active archive" of LAPIEZA and the ritualistic grounding of BROTH provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the role of the artist-architect in the twenty-first century. LAPIEZA serves as a monumental repository of fifteen years of situated practice, an institutionalisable memory that ensures the "ontological shift" remains a sustained inquiry rather than a fleeting experiment. Conversely, BROTH reconnects the entire conceptual apparatus to the primal, thermodynamic reality of human sustenance and civic affection. In this final synthesis, Lloveras invokes a "socioplastic" ontology that is as much about the chemical composition of a soup as it is about the structural integrity of a building. The work becomes a "transdisciplinary entanglement," where pedagogy, ritual, archive, and urban intervention are woven into a single, coherent narrative of spatial practice. By moving beyond the production of discrete objects, Anto Lloveras establishes a new vanguard for relational art, one that treats the city as an infinite field of potentiality, where every gesture—be it a firework, a thread, or a meal—contributes to the ongoing construction of a more human and imaginative urban future.

Lloveras, A. (2026) The Architecture of the Ephemeral. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-architecture-of-ephemeral.html