Works
Portraits
2023
Variable Sizes
You Are Here (Group Exhibition)
The Platform/ Gallery, Antwerp
This series delves into the enigmatic discovery of an old family photo album, shedding light on its neglected contents and the compelling visual narrative that emerges from its abandoned state.
Instead of human subjects, the album's physical attributes take on a newfound significance, becoming the focal point of the visual narrative; such as mold growth, water stains, broken frames, and faded linings, which now take center stage as subjects in their own right.
Through the use of analog medium format photography, each empty frame becomes a reproduction, capturing the essence of the album's silent yet evocative story. This visual exploration seeks to evoke a sense of intrigue and contemplation, inviting viewers to engage with the album's forgotten history and the significance of its neglected imagery.
Instead of human subjects, the album's physical attributes take on a newfound significance, becoming the focal point of the visual narrative; such as mold growth, water stains, broken frames, and faded linings, which now take center stage as subjects in their own right.
Through the use of analog medium format photography, each empty frame becomes a reproduction, capturing the essence of the album's silent yet evocative story. This visual exploration seeks to evoke a sense of intrigue and contemplation, inviting viewers to engage with the album's forgotten history and the significance of its neglected imagery.
Prospective Pour le 22e Siècle
2023
70 x 80 cm
Edition of 300
CCINQ Gallery, Brussels
Prospective: noun, concerning the future evolution of society, permitting elements of forecasting.
In 1967, François Bayle and Pierre Henry created ‘Prospective 21e Siècle’, a collection devoted to musique concrète and electroacoustic, electronic, and avant-garde composers for the French label Philips. Fifty-five years later, we invited Vica Pacheco and Miguel Rózpide to reflect together on a possible 22nd century prospective.
At the end of the sixties, the future was often fantasised about. Future-oriented thinking was the norm and 'art music' was reaching a new audience who were already aware of avant-garde sounds and improvisation by artists like Soft Machine and Frank Zappa.
Between 1967 and 1977, the collection was characterised by the idea of an art resolutely centred on anticipation and modernity with a desire to understand and question the future. As part of an experimental process, we asked visual artist Miguel Rózpide to think of a unique image that would be published as posters. During these 3 evenings of performance, the audience is invited to take the print home with them as a mark of a moment in time.
Miguel Rózpide's visual approach lies in a place where the difference between environment and subject is defined. His images pay particular attention to what happens there, they enrich the ordinary and undoubtedly evoke an atmosphere, whether warm or sterile. There are places, objects, people or animals, and colours that envelop them. The palette is restricted, sometimes even sombre, and the images are realistic whilst flirting with abstraction. In Rózpide's work —as in the colour field painting movement— colour is freed from its figurative functions and invites itself into the frame as a subject.
Here, Miguel Rózpide’s image is quite different, at least in its initial appearance. The subject is an unplugged incubator, placed in a neutral grey space, under the sharp lights of a photography studio.
This is an industrially-formatted image; it's timeless but dated, inhabiting a formal dimension where the object is the photograph. It evokes a certain idea of a consumer society where "beauty is born from the balance between form and function" (Formes Utiles - UAM).
Is this "neutral" proposed by Rózpide evoking a kind of "not yet", a thought at the edge of language, a superposition of matching tones?
What does this incubator, which protects the baby from the cold because it is not yet mature enough to regulate its temperature, say to us? What does this tone-on-tone tell us?
No matter what Vica Pacheco's sources of inspiration and concerns are, she definitely has a taste for hybridization. When producing sound installations, she likes to confront the most heterogeneous elements existing between field recordings and manipulated voices. She creates an atmosphere, a place transformed, a science fiction soundtrack and, of course, prospective research. The recognizable sounds speak to us as if they were the present being transformed. The story is this: we do not come from nothing, we remember. In an almost cinematographic narration we make a journey, we extrapolate, we move forward. It’s a journey to the beyond, between utopia, space-opera, and an alternate history.
For three days at CCINQ Vica Pacheco will experiment with detailed recordings in and around the incubator object-subject of the poster. Pacheco will freely imagine a world set apart by means of sound design, and will present the results of her research each evening. The three performances will bring conceptualism, confusion and recognition, and transforming art through the links between artists into question. The audience knows that it's not about the real world, it's about research that could lead us to an escape, to a better world.
Finally, viewers will be able to take the physical production home with them, allowing its reactivation and reconfiguration outside of CCINQ. They will also leave with an immaterial element, an echo of the world transformed into what it is not (or not yet), a distancing one can appreciate.
Written by Patrick Carpentier
In 1967, François Bayle and Pierre Henry created ‘Prospective 21e Siècle’, a collection devoted to musique concrète and electroacoustic, electronic, and avant-garde composers for the French label Philips. Fifty-five years later, we invited Vica Pacheco and Miguel Rózpide to reflect together on a possible 22nd century prospective.
At the end of the sixties, the future was often fantasised about. Future-oriented thinking was the norm and 'art music' was reaching a new audience who were already aware of avant-garde sounds and improvisation by artists like Soft Machine and Frank Zappa.
Between 1967 and 1977, the collection was characterised by the idea of an art resolutely centred on anticipation and modernity with a desire to understand and question the future. As part of an experimental process, we asked visual artist Miguel Rózpide to think of a unique image that would be published as posters. During these 3 evenings of performance, the audience is invited to take the print home with them as a mark of a moment in time.
Miguel Rózpide's visual approach lies in a place where the difference between environment and subject is defined. His images pay particular attention to what happens there, they enrich the ordinary and undoubtedly evoke an atmosphere, whether warm or sterile. There are places, objects, people or animals, and colours that envelop them. The palette is restricted, sometimes even sombre, and the images are realistic whilst flirting with abstraction. In Rózpide's work —as in the colour field painting movement— colour is freed from its figurative functions and invites itself into the frame as a subject.
Here, Miguel Rózpide’s image is quite different, at least in its initial appearance. The subject is an unplugged incubator, placed in a neutral grey space, under the sharp lights of a photography studio.
This is an industrially-formatted image; it's timeless but dated, inhabiting a formal dimension where the object is the photograph. It evokes a certain idea of a consumer society where "beauty is born from the balance between form and function" (Formes Utiles - UAM).
Is this "neutral" proposed by Rózpide evoking a kind of "not yet", a thought at the edge of language, a superposition of matching tones?
What does this incubator, which protects the baby from the cold because it is not yet mature enough to regulate its temperature, say to us? What does this tone-on-tone tell us?
No matter what Vica Pacheco's sources of inspiration and concerns are, she definitely has a taste for hybridization. When producing sound installations, she likes to confront the most heterogeneous elements existing between field recordings and manipulated voices. She creates an atmosphere, a place transformed, a science fiction soundtrack and, of course, prospective research. The recognizable sounds speak to us as if they were the present being transformed. The story is this: we do not come from nothing, we remember. In an almost cinematographic narration we make a journey, we extrapolate, we move forward. It’s a journey to the beyond, between utopia, space-opera, and an alternate history.
For three days at CCINQ Vica Pacheco will experiment with detailed recordings in and around the incubator object-subject of the poster. Pacheco will freely imagine a world set apart by means of sound design, and will present the results of her research each evening. The three performances will bring conceptualism, confusion and recognition, and transforming art through the links between artists into question. The audience knows that it's not about the real world, it's about research that could lead us to an escape, to a better world.
Finally, viewers will be able to take the physical production home with them, allowing its reactivation and reconfiguration outside of CCINQ. They will also leave with an immaterial element, an echo of the world transformed into what it is not (or not yet), a distancing one can appreciate.
Written by Patrick Carpentier
Portraits
2023
30 x 30 cm / 70 x 90 cm
Sint-Lukas Galerie, Brussels
From I to 0 uses first experiences of different people as a starting point. Using a conceptual approach, this project aims to increase the dynamics between audience and author by visualizing emotions and by investigating the duality that ensues from differences in interpretation.
Society is thought to be socially constructed through human interpretation. People interpret each other’s behaviour, and these interpretations form the social bond. As a result, the artist can imagine and interpret these experiences without being hindered by their social and cultural background.
By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, Miguel Rózpide tries to approach a wide range of subjects in a multi-layered way, involving the viewer in a physical and spiritual way. Images and text are confronted while being interrelated through memory and projection.
Society is thought to be socially constructed through human interpretation. People interpret each other’s behaviour, and these interpretations form the social bond. As a result, the artist can imagine and interpret these experiences without being hindered by their social and cultural background.
By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, Miguel Rózpide tries to approach a wide range of subjects in a multi-layered way, involving the viewer in a physical and spiritual way. Images and text are confronted while being interrelated through memory and projection.
For the First Time
2019
40 x 40 cm
The Loop
Art Residency w/ Bonfire
Brussels, Blegium
The Repeated Image
2019
Handmade oak frames & Museum Glass
30 x 40 cm
Antwerp, Blegium
In this first group of works from The Repeated Image, Miguel Rózpide selects photographs from his family archive that appear twice or almost twice. They show moments that repeat with a small shift in time or a change in angle. These tiny variations reveal how memory works, not as a single fixed point but as a series of almost identical moments that each carry their own small differences.
Each photograph has been rephotographed and printed using piezography in order to match the original tones of the archive. The process creates a precise copy of the image as it was found, and this accuracy highlights the delicate space between one version and the next.
Rózpide brings these near repetitions into dialogue with pairs of homophones. The words echo each other in sound yet move apart in meaning. When combined with the twin images, the connection between looking and reading becomes more open and uncertain. Language slips between clarity and ambiguity, just as the photographs slip between sameness and change. The viewer is invited to notice how small shifts in context can alter what an image or a word seems to say.
Across the five frames, this quiet play of images and words forms a clear and gentle structure. It invites attention to the slight movements that shape memory, to moments that repeat but never fully match, and to the unexpected meanings that appear when two almost identical things are placed side by side.
Each photograph has been rephotographed and printed using piezography in order to match the original tones of the archive. The process creates a precise copy of the image as it was found, and this accuracy highlights the delicate space between one version and the next.
Rózpide brings these near repetitions into dialogue with pairs of homophones. The words echo each other in sound yet move apart in meaning. When combined with the twin images, the connection between looking and reading becomes more open and uncertain. Language slips between clarity and ambiguity, just as the photographs slip between sameness and change. The viewer is invited to notice how small shifts in context can alter what an image or a word seems to say.
Across the five frames, this quiet play of images and words forms a clear and gentle structure. It invites attention to the slight movements that shape memory, to moments that repeat but never fully match, and to the unexpected meanings that appear when two almost identical things are placed side by side.
Publications
From 1 to 20
2019
Self-published
24 pages
Edition of 5
Design and binding by Manon Donckier
Brussels, Blegium
From 1 to 20 continues Miguel Rózpide’s exploration of his family archive by focusing on the system his grandfather used to organise it. Each slide was marked with a number. Slides that shared the same number were not intended to be placed together, yet they now form unexpected pairs.
Rózpide brings these numbered slides into sequence and presents them side by side. The pairings open fragile links between images that were once far apart in time or subject. A landscape meets an airport. A domestic scene sits next to a fragment of travel. The logic of the archive becomes visible, but so does its unpredictability.
The book moves from number one to number twenty. The structure is simple, almost methodical, yet the images create their own quiet stories. The archive becomes a place where order and chance overlap, and where meaning occurs in the space between two unrelated photographs that happen to share the same handwritten mark.
Through this approach, Rózpide highlights the small gestures that shape an archive. A number written in pencil becomes an invitation to look again and to read the collection in a new way. The book offers a calm and deliberate rhythm, allowing each pair to speak for itself while revealing how a single organising system can hold countless possible connections.
Rózpide brings these numbered slides into sequence and presents them side by side. The pairings open fragile links between images that were once far apart in time or subject. A landscape meets an airport. A domestic scene sits next to a fragment of travel. The logic of the archive becomes visible, but so does its unpredictability.
The book moves from number one to number twenty. The structure is simple, almost methodical, yet the images create their own quiet stories. The archive becomes a place where order and chance overlap, and where meaning occurs in the space between two unrelated photographs that happen to share the same handwritten mark.
Through this approach, Rózpide highlights the small gestures that shape an archive. A number written in pencil becomes an invitation to look again and to read the collection in a new way. The book offers a calm and deliberate rhythm, allowing each pair to speak for itself while revealing how a single organising system can hold countless possible connections.
Panacea
2018
Self-published
54 pages
Edition of 3
Design and binding by Francisco Santamouris
Brussels, Blegium
Human connection brings complex values to our lives: relationships give us a sense of belonging in the group, a sense of identity in contrast to others in that group, an almost therapeutic-support system, and reason not to feel lonely. We learn from others’ experiences and insights, and we learn together by pursuing new experiences alongside those we befriend.
In existential circles it’s often said that no two people have ever sat in the same room. This is because our own unique life histories and genetic makeups color the way we perceive the world around us, so that the same objective data point is interpreted differently by me than it is by you. This is existential isolation in a nutshell, the fact that an insurmountable invisible barrier exists between each and every one of us, that no matter how close our physical proximity may be, a psychic distance remains in that you don’t have access to my subjective life experience, to my inner world, except insofar as I explain it to you, and I don’t have access to your subjective life experience, to your inner world except insofar as you explain it to me. And again my explanation will be interpreted by you based upon your own unique life history and genetic makeup and your explanation will be interpreted by me based upon my own unique life history and genetic makeup.
These insights can lead to an oppressive sense of loneliness but they don’t have to, and actually we want to make the case here that it’s our very existential isolation that acts as the impetus for us to reach out to people and the world, to move beyond our smallness in order to connect with and influence the entities around us in a meaningful way. If we were all exactly the same, all experienced the world in the same way, all had the exact same life histories and genetic makeups, there would be little reason to reach beyond ourselves.
The result would be a sort of comfortable complacency, a womblike state without anything pushing us or pulling us to move beyond ourselves. Panacea is trying to reach out to the people I know, my friends, and what surrounds them. I try to enter their own worlds that somehow we share but are very difficult to visualise, process and understand. This series recognises and honours continued individuality while building community, it allows differentness and sameness to exist side by side. This sort of connection allows both entities to be first accepted but also modified in small and big ways. Through this process of modification, people get to know each other in profoundly intimate ways, they fuse through shared experiences and through their commitment to seeing things from the other’s vantage point rather than forcing their own vantage points upon the other, and the result is that perhaps two people can sit in the same room after all.
In existential circles it’s often said that no two people have ever sat in the same room. This is because our own unique life histories and genetic makeups color the way we perceive the world around us, so that the same objective data point is interpreted differently by me than it is by you. This is existential isolation in a nutshell, the fact that an insurmountable invisible barrier exists between each and every one of us, that no matter how close our physical proximity may be, a psychic distance remains in that you don’t have access to my subjective life experience, to my inner world, except insofar as I explain it to you, and I don’t have access to your subjective life experience, to your inner world except insofar as you explain it to me. And again my explanation will be interpreted by you based upon your own unique life history and genetic makeup and your explanation will be interpreted by me based upon my own unique life history and genetic makeup.
These insights can lead to an oppressive sense of loneliness but they don’t have to, and actually we want to make the case here that it’s our very existential isolation that acts as the impetus for us to reach out to people and the world, to move beyond our smallness in order to connect with and influence the entities around us in a meaningful way. If we were all exactly the same, all experienced the world in the same way, all had the exact same life histories and genetic makeups, there would be little reason to reach beyond ourselves.
The result would be a sort of comfortable complacency, a womblike state without anything pushing us or pulling us to move beyond ourselves. Panacea is trying to reach out to the people I know, my friends, and what surrounds them. I try to enter their own worlds that somehow we share but are very difficult to visualise, process and understand. This series recognises and honours continued individuality while building community, it allows differentness and sameness to exist side by side. This sort of connection allows both entities to be first accepted but also modified in small and big ways. Through this process of modification, people get to know each other in profoundly intimate ways, they fuse through shared experiences and through their commitment to seeing things from the other’s vantage point rather than forcing their own vantage points upon the other, and the result is that perhaps two people can sit in the same room after all.
Vol. 1
2017
Self-published
Edition of 10
Volume 1 is the first book Miguel Rózpide created. It grew from a need to look at death through modest and familiar scenes. The images come from everyday life, yet they hold a quiet tension. They suggest the fragile space where life and death sit close to each other.
At the centre of the book is a single sentence. The things that help me stay alive are the ones that kill me faster. It is not an explanation, only a simple truth placed among the images. It stays open and allows the viewer to find their own reading.
This book marks the beginning of a way of working. It shows an interest in collecting fragments and arranging them so that meaning appears slowly, through small gestures and calm observation.
At the centre of the book is a single sentence. The things that help me stay alive are the ones that kill me faster. It is not an explanation, only a simple truth placed among the images. It stays open and allows the viewer to find their own reading.
This book marks the beginning of a way of working. It shows an interest in collecting fragments and arranging them so that meaning appears slowly, through small gestures and calm observation.