Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez-Delgado: Futuros Itinerantes

ICA San Diego / North, August 17, 2024 -December 29, 2024

Puerto Rican-born, New Mexico-based artist Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez-Delgado (b. 1982) utilizes repurposed electronics and discarded materials to craft self-contained survival systems that address the challenges of a planet grappling with an uncertain future. Through his process of speculative invention, Rodríguez-Delgado reconciles the scientific promise of his youth with the urgent climate and energy crises of the present. 

Steeped in the futures visualized by Star Trek: The Next Generation, the US Space Program, and Puerto Rico’s bid to host the 2004 Olympics, Rodríguez-Delgado’s work is both an elegy to an unrealized technological utopia and an adaptation of those ideals to present and future challenges. His future-minded innovations include a new font, “Orbital Basic,” which reinterprets letters in straight lines only, making it easier to write while wearing a bulky spacesuit. 

Futuros Itinerantes–his first solo museum show in the continental United States–Rodríguez-Delgado will present a new body of work that combines installation, drawing, collage, and video.

Photos by Philipp Scholz Ritterman