Roswell-based Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez-Delgado treads the line between artist and inventor, exploring themes of displacement, identity, and alternative futures.
Roswell, New Mexico | upwardive.weebly.com | @manolorodriguezdelgado | represented by the Canary Test, Los Angeles
As a child waiting patiently each week for the Spanish-dubbed episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation to air, Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez-Delgado became entranced by the fantasy of sci-fi and its romanticized promises of the future. Many years later, he is still enthralled by futuristic landscapes, although political, social, and environmental realities have transformed his speculative utopia into more of a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Rodríguez-Delgado treads the line between artist and inventor, exploring themes of displacement, identity, and alternative futures. His technological objects are constructed using recycled and refurbished electronics and hardware. He is currently based in Roswell, New Mexico, where he moved in 2020 as a recipient of the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. But as a proud Puerto Rican, you can often find materials within his assemblages that are sourced directly from his homeland, paying homage to his heritage and family.
In his series of tower-like objects titled Combina Orbital (Orbital Combine), Rodríguez-Delgado originally intended to depict free-floating oil rigs inhabited by nomadic populations of displaced engineers and scientists. He imagined these autonomous groups advancing and expanding into communities. In Estudio para Combina Orbital #2 (2023), a small malanga plant—collected from his family’s coffee farm in Lares, Puerto Rico—grows out of the upper structure, watered by an automotive windshield wiper pump. An LCD screen depicts scenes from the rainforest while a switchboard, power hub, and speakers grow out of the object’s various appendages.
Some of his creations are wearable, like Viajero (Traveler) (2024), a backpack that displays a video of a creek deep within the Puerto Rican rainforest alongside a small volcanic rock and soil from the same location. The backpack is a battery-powered PAPR (powered air-purifying respirator) that pumps clean air to the wearer’s mouthpiece. “I am interested in the ways these objects behave as artifacts of near-future realities and speculative cultural identities,” he writes in a statement.
Although his experimental devices may initially invoke medical or mechanical equipment, they also emit the spiritual energy of a shrine or altar. And despite how Rodríguez-Delgado’s theoretical future involves self-sustaining breathing devices, it is impossible not to recognize the inherent hope within each of his sci-fi objects.
