Disbel Roque

Outside the Field is an action that involves the investigation and narration of uses that are rendered invisible, in relation to the areas in which they take place, inside the Casa de Campo Park in Madrid. It is presented in the form of a socioecological guide and inventory, by way of a public-critical art activity.

A 4-month immersion in this hybrid space, a former royal hunting ground nowadays primarily set aside for leisure and recreation, living in it regularly in order to track and gather hidden and subjugated histories of the area; provoking chance encounters, discovering a territory with a long history of disputed uses, proposing moments of interaction and mapping the territory from the corporal presence in coexistence with those of other plant species and the materiality of the public space of a park. Using a 2 x 3 m mobile habitat as a “control room”, as a working infrastructure, exchanges are carried out with other users linked to each specific place, different from the normative. Clandestine inhabitants, people who pass through furtively, invisible workers and others, oblivious to the hustle and bustle, displaying parallel and silenced forms of enjoyment of the place.

The result of those anonymous stories, uses, readings and traces are brought together in a catalogue of places, an inventory of nooks and crannies and a kind of herbarium as a starting point for this cartography and guide to the park, yet to be discovered.

Disbel Roque (1994, Holguín, Cuba) currently in Madrid. After studying Fine Arts at the Holguín Professional Academy of Plastic Arts (Cuba, 2009-2013) and at the Havana Higher Institute of Art (Cuba, 2014-20019), he obtained a Landa grant from the Escuela Espositivo and moved to Madrid for postgraduate studies (2019-2020).  He was then invited as an artist to the Centre for Approaching the Rural, in Madrid.

He has taken part in international events such as Salón ACME, DF, Mexico; and PerfoArtNet, International Performance Art Biennial in Colombia. Exhibition  Magic Realism (Realismo Mágico), Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Canada. He obtained The Kingdom of this World (El Reino de este Mundo) award and the Antonia Eiriz grant. In Spain he has taken part in such exhibitions as AMBEIBI, OpenStudio and Master Exhibition, and in the Bañarte Art Encounter in La Rioja. In Cuba: the 12th Havana Biennial, The May Pilgrimages (Las Romerías de Mayo); exhibitions such as: Scraping (Raspadura), Postures and Impostures (Postures e Imposturas), The Given Land (La Tierra Dada).