Mariaelena Roqué is an artist who defies easy classification and, precisely for that reason, a singular figure in Catalan contemporary art.

Historically, her career has been closely associated with the Carles Santos Company (Santos-Roqué), which she co-founded with the musician, an iconic avant-garde group of the 1980s and 1990s. Their performances provocatively combined music, dance, performance art, and visual poetics.

However, this association does not fully encompass the breadth of her individual practice, which has developed through experimentation and freedom across different media.

Marielena Roqué’s work is situated at the intersection of the visual arts, sculpture, costume-characters, performance, and audiovisual media. Rather than adhering to a specific discipline, she appropriates and combines different artistic languages.

In her costume-character-sculptures, the body and its psyche become simultaneously both the support and the subject of the work. The human silhouette expands, conceals itself, or transforms until it acquires a hybrid condition between body, object, and sculpture.

From her position as a woman and an artist, her practice incorporates a critical perspective on the construction of identity and gender roles. Deeply committed to women’s rights, she uses the female body as a space for expression, evolution, and resistance.

This freedom to move across different media allows her work to be understood as fundamentally interdisciplinary, with matter, body, image, movement, and space interacting and transforming one another.

RocioSantaCruz’s proposal thus offers an approach to Mariaelena Roqué’s work through the richness and complexity of a practice that transcends the boundaries between genres and explores, through multiple media, the relationships between body and identity.

Along this path, it creates space for a silenced voice, reaffirming Roqué as an essential figure in feminist and contemporary art.