Manuel Rocha Iturbide

In the last years I have become a passionate collector, motivated by the search of old objects that with the contact of my look may automatically become ready mades. I am not moved by the common fetishism of trying to accumulate all that exist of one subject. My interest for these objects has more to do with my taste and aesthetic motivations as an artist, and with the need to convert them in something new, to take them to a second level, the creation of a new aesthetical discourse that will not discard their historical context.

But why this addiction, this anxiety to collect, to gather things? is this a fight against death and against the entropy of past waste? in this exhibition I try to give an explanation or at least to foresee a first way out of an almost sickly diversion that has taken me to accumulate different objects impregnated of memory, nostalgia, aesthetic beauty generated by past designers, but also from the memory of people that have become registered in photographic images and recordings in reel, cassette and mini cassette tapes. The exhibition thus becomes a fragment of a personal archive that tries to become an artistic work starting from the appropriation and reinterpretation of different groups of visual and aural messages. In these sets I find repetitions, regularities and rules, and through my intuition y try to commune with theses objects pasts by way of a nostalgia that is perpetuated.

Maybe the interpretation of Michel Foucault of an archive could clarify better my intentions:  "the archive is also that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity, nor do they disappear at the mercy of chance or external accidents; but they are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained and blurred in accordance with specific regularities; that which determines that they do not withdraw at the same pace in time, but shine as it were, like stars, some that seem close to us shining brightly from afar off, while others that are in fact close to us are already growing pale..."

— Manuel Rocha Iturbide