Artists
Dagoberto Rodríguez (1969, Caibarién, Cuba) was one of the founders of the Cuban art collective called Los Carpinteros, along with Alexandre Arrechea and Marco Antonio Castillo. Active between 1992 and 2018, the group became known for breaking barriers between disciplines such as design, architecture, sculpture and installation, and was characterised by its critical and ironic content on Cuba's socio-political reality. Los Carpinteros described how people used to live in Cuba during those twenty years prior to Obama's visit in 2016. Since he embarked on his solo career, Rodríguez has become immersed in painting, without putting aside installation and his particular symbolic language. His work is still marked by a strong political commitment and by what he defines as ‘poetic activism’, in which humor – as he says, a defense mechanism inherited from his life in Cuba – coexists with tough issues like war, migration or climate change. He does not seek to give answers, but to make people think. To him, his mission as an artist is to create ‘poetic scenarios’ in which stories can be told in a different way.
