Imagine a volcano of bread flour ready to receive liquid before becoming dough and movement. Now imagine that this volcano is a sculpture. Yes, familiar and ephemeral. This exhibition could begin thirteen years ago with this image; Roxana was an artist and had become a mother in those months. At that time, her colleagues began traveling to international residencies, and she decided to invent her own. She left with her baby to Cafayate, to her mother’s house. There, like a researcher, she surveyed the poetic practices of the domestic environment, delving into nearly everything, and what didn’t appear at that moment came over the years, as often happens in families. Do you hear it? That’s the stealth of the nap, guarding the burdens. But let’s return to the year 2010; from that foray into her primary environment emerged an exhibition called ‘Family Art,’ composed of many works, among which was an installation featuring a cockfighting pen. Inside, the volcanic flour could be seen. This sequence also tells us something about the work Roxana has been creating for over two decades in the northern region of the country. Among objects and actions, she experiments with a particular skill: taming a torrent of personal forces deeply rooted in the historical memory of her region.

Her works are catapults. She traces from the nearby and launches on a long journey. It is the path that takes on the burden of inheritance, like her family’s craft of bakers more directly evoked since 2019, yet present since before. In this exhibition, it appears in the monumental sculptures ‘Mango de pala’ (2023). Over six meters of whole petiribí wood, each piece comes from the heart of a tree, each with its prism at the end where the paddles used in the old bread ovens could be fitted, those that worked with coal heat and were the size of a studio apartment. There is no exaggeration in scale, no distortion, no surrealism; these handles are made to measure the material memory of family labor and are presented here with the density of historical discovery and the emotion of proximity, a double front that Roxana maintains as a constant throughout her work.

Something different happens on the wall. We can intuit that the artist attacked the tidiness with a tool. It is a pike, a wooden roller composed of multiple steel pieces embedded, with a medieval appearance, worn by years. This roller is used in bakeries to manipulate dough. Roxana uses it to perforate the plane of the gallery’s white cube. ‘Freehand’ (2022) is an action that releases contained force, an energetic will trained with rigor. The performance of her body striking the wall is more about a type of endurance training than overflow. Training, like the one she has been doing at seven in the morning for many years, alternating between sequences of high-intensity exercises and others of stretching and deep breathing. In this oscillation of divergent energies, she specializes in governing them, something her works do between the intimate and the social, between her body and the territory, between the familiar and the uncertain. In the gallery, these perforations function like wormholes in outer space: on this side, it’s June 2023 in Salta, on the other, beings are living a century ago, it’s very hot, and the environment is enveloped in a haze of flour and ash. Between early rising and her body exposed to effort, Roxana’s practice is shaped; what travels through time is not just a sacrificial image, but also confidence in the discipline of exercise to empower her genealogy.

After a decade from that flour mound, in 2022, another volcano appears on the horizon, an ode to the earth, the protective warrior of the Lickan-antay people: Licancabur in the Atacama Desert, north of Chile. In the context of the Saco Art Biennial, Roxana developed a series of field experiences, including the action recorded in the video ‘Eruption’ (2022). We see her shoveling sand that disperses and falls back to the ground repeatedly. We can see how she makes clay float down like dry rain; I wonder if this is how rains will be in the near future. A minimal event in the midst of an immense place, like the riches that are inherent to it. With little, she, a shovel or a trident, points out a historical enclave and a commodity at the same time. It seems that wherever Roxana moves, she carries with her the self-aware practice characteristic of the conceptualisms of the seventies, with their austere resources and laden with symbolism with heroic touches. Her images grow, paradoxically, the more volatile they are, as elusive as her shadow; they offer us a distant reflection that shines urgently in the present.