PublicationsMovil Catalogue 2014-2017.
Experiencias 2008-2018, UTDT.
¨Organic alloys¨ departs from the idea of a star collapsing from its core. In the stages prior to the fusion, the 26 elements that make the periodic table are generated. Then its core becomes pure iron, its last state. When the core turns into pure iron and does not fuse anymore, the next step is the explosion of the star. The meteorite, as a result of the explosion, reaches earth with all the enzymes and bacteria necessary to create life. For this this specific reason I decide to work with metal foundry from everyday discarded mass consumption products or scheduled obsolescence such as: car engines and beer cans. All these contemporary these metals were originated in these cosmic explosions. In order to create a miniature replica of these fusions, I created a portable foundry oven to use in the public space. In my quest of adding another quality to metal, I merged them with vitamins and minerals from organic matter (discarded fruit collected in the street markets in Mexico City). Some of the other substances I have added to the merging: precious stones, tree resin, tobacco, myrrh, storax, anise, dandelion, palo santo, dehydrated fish, cinnamon. There is an interest in transforming the spirit of the material I work with. Most of the foundries were made in the full moon and in the eclipse of the sun of August 21, 2017. Immediate contact with the earth is part of the fusion as a sculptural gesture. The resulting sculptures are unique to the earths quality of the specific site.
By Guillermo Santamarina
Roque investigates the landscape, literally and physically. He takes it, atomized, in bodies in semi-liquid or semi-solid state, related to a process that combines the advantages of foundry and forging, but outside the conventional workshop, and directly in and on emblematic perimeters.
A strategy that serves him, paradoxically, as a model, alike experience, analysis, knowledge, and denial, or overcoming, of his immanent reality, not very different from that imposed by the obsessive civil logic.
The exercise is reminiscent of an archaeological cove method (one of the sculptures presented in this exhibition was tempered on a step of the Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacán, another on a step of a street market) as well as the voids of Yves Klein, and the pours of Robert Smithson, the main protagonist of the current Land Art who would say:
“Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, and other kinds of rock, the new monuments are made of artificial materials, such as plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. Rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries, they are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds. “
In the limits that set the pattern of a precise time-free space, that of cryptic or evicted monuments in history, with the cultures of Sebastian Roque, could subscribe these words of the poet Paul Valery: “The impressions and sense perceptions of man, considered in themselves, belong in the category of surprises; they are evidence of an insufficiency in man. Recollection… is an elemental phenomenon which aims at giving us the time for organizing the reception of stimuli which we initially lacked “
By Ariadna González Naya
Ascent consists of a series of used wood struts, nails, braces, a ladder and four forced men. It is a clear and simple structure, but it had to be rigorously studied to verify its stability, its bearing capacity, and of course, its civil security.
A few months ago, in a lot that Di Tella University seemed to have abandoned, Roque installed a kind of park, a route with different pieces armed with materials that he had found in the place itself. There, bordering the wall, there was a staircase that had to be climbed to collect the cotton fruits of the Palo Borracho (in Spanish literally ‘Drunk Stick’) and, in passing, allowed to trample over the wall and see a row of carefully arranged seedlings, and the religious building that is hidden behind the wall.
Thus, that ladder can be thought of as referring to Ascension. There are three elements that take center stage here and that, it seems, could help define Sebastian Roque's work plan. First, the preparation of the pieces with used materials. The phenolic plates that cover the tower of Roque were, in some construction, found of a building. Second, there is a force in Roque's works that underlies each stage: in the transfer of materials, the assembly of the prism, and the operation of the human lift. The weight of the elements, their transfer, stress the effort and the load. Third and last, Roque asks in his works that the public becomes a catalyst, only his participation makes the piece make sense.
It can be thought that there is a primitive thought based on the rusticity of the materials and the mechanics of ascension: thanks to the coordinated and rhythmic force of four men, the spectator reaches the top of the work. However there is a thought or a scientific formation. Roque, before being an artist, used to be an architect, and uses certain technical knowledge to project this structure which can support in height the weight of several people.
Without knowing one of the premises of Jaume Plensa, Roque meets on exactly what the Spanish sculptor proclaimed: the sculpture is not a problem of materials but of emotions. In this way, Roque achieves what many works of art crave, generating an experience that transforms the viewer.
Mariana Rodríguez Iglesias
Friday, 16th of June 2013 - Program of the artists of UTDT.
Installation at the margins. For a few weeks, an abandoned space of the UTDT became the playground of a mad inventor, obsessed with the idea of surviving outside the System. This lunatic creator was generating a series of devices for survival, connected to each other as a structure with its own rules. All this happened at the margin of the everyday life that was conducting the University and it is likely that it would have gone unnoticed if it were not because it was the work of one of the artists of the Program, Sebastián Roque.
Space and objects were reused and provisionally converted by artist in a habitat to live in the margin. In that context of abandonment, he generated situations with materials found on the site itself. For its route, objects placed in relation were dispersed in space. But there could also be found other situations related to the resources of permaculture or urban self-cultivation. For example, several leafy vegetables were planted (and grew) on the upper edge of a demolished wall that adjoined the exterior; an irrigation system was recreated with plastic bags loaded with water that at first glance looked like soft sculptures - they hung from the beams and connected to the pots through thick threads; a moist compost was assembled in a huge metal pot; a grill-tube for cooking sausages was invented - formally, a metal tube with one of its ends on a bonfire and a string of coiled sausages that should be cooked by heat transmission. But not everything that could be found there was functional. There was also a large canvas, as if it were a painting that will never be painted, hanging from one of its vertices; there were iron structures like bare edges of an invisible prism; or a bundle of splintered wood stuck in a broken window; two brick towers stacked neatly that welcomed the route.
Both the place and the waste found there were forgotten until Roque devised a new life for each one of them. For those of us who were able to visit it, the installation was presented as a park of ingenious situations. Despite the effort to achieve unity as a whole, the interventions and constructions that spread throughout the space proposed two different types of experiences. On the one hand, that of the devices obtained from formal research and, on the other, that of instruments that enunciated alternative uses to objects already defunctionalized. The first group would be the result of the practice of approaching sculpture in an empirical-experimental way for the generation of ephemeral forms with the elements that space itself made available; while in the second group we could place the compositions that were offered as a new way of performing everyday activities but denatured in our urban context. In these parts the action was the most important. Before the good appearance or quality of what was built, what was emphasized in each small alternative system was the energy, its circulation, its promise to generate something new. Those of us who went through the installation were surprised by the practical possibilities of elements that we would call "garbage" at first glance. This segment of works indicated the dystopia of the world in which we had to live, characterized by unbridled consumption and the obsolescence of praxis and objects.
This divide between formal exercises and alternative proposals was not clear or categorical in the installation, but can serve as a map to travel through the world of multiple crossed interests of this artist. A topography of intuitions that could be interpreted as lacking focus, for the various topics that it tries to cover. In this way, the meaning of the work is homologated to the marginal route that it seeks to do: it raises a series of situations to survive on the perimeter of the System and also locates its focus, its own determination of concerns, in an off-center manner.