Photo: Freddy Arciniegas - Arcpixel
EVENTS
SBC galerie d'art contemporain
372 Rue Sainte-Catherine O Suite 507, Montréal, QC
Free, no registration needed
For the public programming related to this exhibition, please click here.
*RADIO MILPA*
Radio Milpa broadcasts the sound piece from the exhibition NOUS/OTRXS 24/7, featuring archives, interviews, and contributions from collaborators.
LISTEN HERE 24/7
ACCESSIBILITY
The exhibition is not wheelchair-accessible due to bricks and woodchips placed on the floor.
The space features continuous radio static and bright lighting.
MARTÍN RODRÍGUEZ
11.09 - 01.11.2025
“For a people who are neither Spanish nor live in a country in which Spanish is the first language... what recourse is left to them but to create their own language?”
Gloria Anzaldúa
The team at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art is pleased to invite you to launch its 2025–2026 programming with a new solo exhibition by Martin Rodriguez, entitled NOUS/OTRXS. The opening will take place on Thursday, September 11, from 5 to 8 PM at the gallery.
Blending ancestral agricultural practices, radio transmission, and community engagement, Rodríguez’s NOUS/OTRXS cultivates a living archive that links past and future, land and migration, human and non-human life. A garden-installation takes over the gallery space, activating a process in which sound stories from communities intertwine with non-human plant life, subsisting in a new form.
Through an antenna planted in the soil, the plants are nourished by a constant flow of water, light, and radio waves. As seeds emerge from this plant-radio relationship, the process opens pathways for interspecies and intergenerational knowledge transmission, connecting personal and collective histories through alternative timelines. This gesture seeks to nurture relationships between territories and their inhabitants, while imagining a shared future.
NOUS/OTRXS engages with ancestral knowledge through a speculative act of care, cultivating Mesoamerican heirloom seeds alongside crops native to Québec. These seeds are accompanied by radio broadcasts drawn from a sonic archive of migrant songs, stories, and sounds. At the centre of the gallery, an improvised radio station houses a garden built using traditional farming methods: the Milpa and Chinampas (Aztec floating permaculture gardens). This act of sowing ancestral seeds into the soil of a distant land becomes a parable for the Latin American experience in so-called Canada, an experience that often remains untold.
NOUS/OTRXS
RADIO MILPA
This project is possible thanks to the collaborations of Conseil Migrant, a Montreal-based organization dedicated to education on rights and health for migrant families, particularly those with precarious legal status; and Radio Nopal, a collective internet radio station based in Mexico City that uses free technologies and serves as a platform for artistic residencies, workshops, and community exchange. The project also integrates the voices of participants interviewed by the artist with the help of Oscar del Rosario and Aaraón Díaz Mendiburo, whose contributions are central to the work.
MARTÍN RODRÍGUEZ
As a transmission and sound artist, Martín Rodríguez’s work emerges from his Xicanx upbringing along the Arizona-Mexico border. He employs performance, intervention, and installation as a process for deciphering aural histories and entangled identities.
After recovering from surgery to remove a brain tumor, a chance encounter with a radio transmission caught in the pickup coils of his guitar reoriented Rodríguez. Developing his practice from crisis, he examines radio as a transformative medium. Rooting his relationship with radio in healing, his artworks consider transmission as a material through which sound intertwines with affect, acting as a vessel for ulterior forms of communication.
Elements of care and speculative thinking create rhizomes throughout his artwork. Utilizing these broader methods, Rodriguez approaches his work from the Xicanx concept of rasquachismo; this methodology utilizes pragmatic ways of remaking and hacking material and objects to reimagine their function. This is a process born from adapting, merging, and creating something practical and new from scarcity.
Notably, his work has been presented by the Musée d’art contemporain Montréal (CA), Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MX), Darling Foundry (CA), Walking Festival for Sound (UK/PL), Spektrum (DE), as well as various festivals and performance venues across Canada, and the US.
THIS EXHIBITION WAS MADE THANKS TO THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF:
