In Rolling Box, Manuel Calderón builds an elemental structure: a wooden cube with one-meter sides, to which he adds two circular faces and a wheeled platform that allows it to rotate on its own axis. Inside this structure, the artist places his body and records, from a fixed point of view, his attempts to remain stable. Gravity interrupts each effort: the slightest movement causes the box to spin, revealing the instability of the forms we try to inhabit.
In the video’s editing, the square remains fixed on the screen while everything around it spins. This perceptual inversion displaces the viewer’s gaze: it is not the object that moves, but the world that contains it. The cube is no longer just a geometric volume, but an altered point of reference—a rotating cell that questions the relationship between body, space, and stability.
The structure recalls the primordial forms that run through Calderón’s work: the square as a symbol of reason and humanity; the circle as an emblem of the cycle, of infinity, of the natural world. But a dimension of scale is also introduced: the one-meter-sided cube recalls a proportion tied to the very history of measurement. The meter, defined as one ten-millionth of the Earth's quadrant, turns this box into a scaled representation of the world. And yet, that rational measure becomes fragile when confronted with rotation, with the loss of balance.
Rolling Box is a simple machine of instability—an elemental architecture that reveals the limits of our need for control, and the ongoing tension between the forms we build and the forces that move through us.
English 
Spanish 
