Buffalo, New York
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art
BICA’s cold, clinical lighting lent an appropriate chill to the unforgettable laboratory of culturally refractive contraptions presented in “Interestatal,” Manuel A. Rodríguez-Delgado’s somber but thrilling taxonomy of anthropogenic detritus. Two bodies of interrelated work simultaneously awkward and elegant, eccentric and meticulous artifacts scrupulously assembled from contemporary debris, read like scrappy and glitchy roadside attractions plucked from a Cormac McCarthy desert and plopped into an underfunded but pristine interstellar museum on a Samuel R. Delany planet.
Rodríguez-Delgado framed these works as sacred memorials to a pilgrimage through a palimpsestic world where explanation has failed. Multiple midnight bicycle rides through the Southwestern hinterlands yielded disorienting visions that he felt compelled to report—eroded corpses of modernity littering an exhausted landscape, fugitive structures once indispensable to the Grand Narrative of Capitalism, now collapsed into the hollow of bankrupt institutional morality. He describes “staring at the meridian that divides the high desert from sky,” gripped by the revelation that there is no way to accurately perceive truth amid a broken creation. The apocalypse has already happened. All that remains is a wary, weary cognition—a profoundly Gnostic premise that we have been tragically slow to grasp.
Wings, flight, and ingenuity figure heavily among Rodríguez-Delgado’s “Objects of the Wasteland” (all works 2025). Hermes (the Greek god of interpretive communication) and his Caduceus (the wand said to awaken the sleeping and send the awake into sleep) are invoked in Helm of the Interpreter of Dreams, Panopla de los Eremitas (Eremites’ Panoply), and Caduceus of Isma’il. These apparatuses, cobbled together from small appliances and powered by burly rechargeable batteries, appear to perform some mitigative function to help the wearer weather the “frequent storms of anthrocarbon dust that soiled the earth” in the bleak parallel universe glimpsed by the artist during his residency in Roswell, New Mexico, last year.
Los Voladores (The Flyers)—small, ultra-lightweight mechanical flying gadgets reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci, crafted from feathers, scrap wood, insulation foam, and rubber bands—would appear to be toys but for their context. Here, they displayed sinister potential as motorless drones armed with small hornet’s nests, and one could easily imagine their silent and devastating impact during a wasteland skirmish. Ingeniousness, resilience, resourcefulness, and adaptability: all indispensable talents for a highly contingent and entropic existence spent condemned to a barren milieu.
Nightflight commemorates Rodríguez-Delgado’s marathon bike rides through the dark in a futuristic reliquary that implies ritual sans doctrine. Framed in its own traveling trunk, complete with handle for easy portability, it gives off an early 20th-century sample case vibe, like a cosmic Fuller Brush salesman’s iconic kit.
Estuche de Incantaciones (Travel Case of Incantations), Estuche de el Sueño de Noviembre (Travel Case of November’s Dream), and Estuche de la Autopista Negra (Case of the Black Highway) contain LCD screens that unspool the artist’s wobbly perambulations superimposed with lyrical musings, transcriptions of a kind of inner dialogue only possible when one is profoundly alone. He uses the word “median” a lot, a loaded term that serves a multiplicity of roles in his misaligned cosmology. In compartments abutting the screens, these traveling cases cushion the fractured remnants of automotive catastrophes—bits of tail lights and shards of chromed plastic, blobs of aluminum salvaged from melted engine blocks, all cradled in precisely molded Ethafoam to underscore their brittle fragility. Rodríguez-Delgado’s careful reverence elevates each shattered fragment to the apotropaic status of a fetish, as if small bits of the souls lost in those long-forgotten wrecks were still clinging on in desperate regret, restive phantoms shielding the bearer.
In the wake of a particularly ineffable late-night encounter, the artist constructed an effigy of one such spirit from “a cow’s skull, ram horns, car parts, shards of brake-light lens plastic, wood, a fire extinguisher, wings cut from the chromed bumper of a Ford F-150, and vulture, raven, and seagull feathers.” The fearsome Carracál would be at home in a Mad Max sequel, a snarling techno-naturalist hallucination with glowing red eyes, barely restrained by its spindly tether to an inscrutably inscribed pedestal.
A fascination with language comes to the fore in this work and in the transit of an unknown celestial object, a gorgeous folding triptych enshrining a hermetically sealed and brightly illuminated manuscript written entirely in “Orbital Básico,” a glyph system devised by Rodríguez-Delgado. The allusion to an extraterrestrial script makes a wry and oblique comment on what it means to be considered “alien,” a frequent, erroneous, and burdensome designation for Puerto Rican Americans (like Rodríguez-Delgado) and a trigger that brings us back to the stark fictive worlds of McCarthy and Delany.
In their dystopic novels, these writers brilliantly demonstrate that most truth is only accessible from the margins, that belonging dulls perception. Through a smudged sci-fi lens, Delany insists that language distributes power unevenly and asks how it shapes what we are allowed to become. McCarthy’s dour Southern Gothic prose argues that the world does not explain itself to the innocent and questions what remains when language fails us completely.
“Interestatal,” Rodríguez-Delgado’s own portmanteau, suggests a midpoint between conditions, where invented script and ingenious devices deploy illegibility and resourcefulness as a form of resistance. The artist forces viewers into illiteracy and uncertainty, shifting the power dynamic that often characterizes arts institutions, where patrons enjoy the privilege of comfortable centricity. “Interestatal” marginalized and destabilized us into realizing what it means to be left out of the narrative altogether: This future doesn’t include you. You don’t have the skills. You won’t survive.
