Dagoberto Rodriguez: Retropía

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry (MACA)

Uruguay

Dagoberto Rodríguez uses humor and irony to address key issues in art, politics and society, combining architecture, design and sculpture. "I don’t think art is capable of changing governments or solving political problems. However, it is capable of generating a state of opinion about a government. My mission as an artist is to set up ‘poetic stages’, and my practice is a form of ‘poetic activism’."

In 1992, together with Alexandre Arrechea and Marco Antonio Castillo, he founded Los Carpinteros, one of the most recognized collectives of contemporary Cuban art, of which he was a member until 2018. The separation from the group became a reinvention, and since then, his working basis and studio has alternated between several cities, currently Madrid, always maintaining an interdisciplinary and collaborative spirit.

The exhibition Retropía brings together an important selection of works articulated in series and closely related to language. The title refers to the essay Retrotopia, a posthumous work of the sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, a reflection where happiness is no longer to be found in the future, but in a past that is idealized and reconstructed. According to Bauman, retrotopias arise from the negation of utopia, which are ideal worlds located in a lost and longed-for past that refuses to die, the memory of which blurs our vision of the future.

Dagoberto puts language into dialogue with the consumer object in the context of Cuba's recent history. From its beginnings, the culture of the automobile has been the bearer of values that have shaped our culture, part of our vital dynamics, linked to design, technology and consumption. A special case is that of the vintage cars circulating in Cuba, a collateral effect of its historical circumstances. These moving museum pieces are the same vehicles that remained on the island when the revolution broke out.

The exhibition also includes a series of watercolors with aerospace landscapes and futuristic architectures, and is completed with the installation Túnel Blanco, a permanent piece placed in the museum's international sculpture park.

Dagoberto Rodríguez was born in Caibarién in 1969, and graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), Havana, Cuba, in 1994. In 1992 he co-founded the collective Los Carpinteros. His works have been exhibited in museums and cultural institutions around the world, such as the MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, among others. Dagoberto Rodríguez currently works in Madrid. Combining architecture, design and sculpture, his work uses humor and irony to comment on art, politics and society.

„Dagoberto Rodríguez. Retropía“ Exhibition View. Museo de Arte Comporaneo Atchugarry, MACA, 2024. Photos by Nicolas Vidal. Courtesy of Museo de Arte Comporaneo Atchugarry.