Dagoberto Rodríguez: Guerra Interior

CAAM Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas, Spain

For nearly five decades, the Cold War pitted the capitalist and communist blocs against each other for geopolitical domination of the planet and also for control of the narrative of history, which in Cuba became the epic of its Caribbean revolution. The possibility of a warlike conflict with the United States turned military preparation into a citizen's duty. Various munitions were part of the imaginary in which Dagoberto grew up, with war as a central element of his possible horizon. When he finished his degree in Arts in 1994, he spent another three months in compulsory military service. After that he was able, officially, to become an artist.

 

The CAAM hosts the first solo exhibition in a Spanish institution by one of the greatest Cuban artists of the turn of the century. Dagoberto Rodríguez, founder and former member of the dissolved Los Carpinteros collective, presents a series of works that mark the beginning of a new stage in his artistic career, which began in the early 1990s in Havana. Shocked by the recent War in Syria, the artist begins a thorough investigation of the conflict that the Islamic State is involved in throughout that region and the ways in which the local population has found to attack and defend itself from its enemy.

 

Most of the works in the exhibition investigate the way in which war infiltrates private spaces, is nourished by elementary materials and ancestral methodologies of confrontation, at the antipodes of the high military technology of the West. The project thus addresses the hostility inherent in the human condition, the struggle as the force of life on a planet governed by relations of enmity, where war, as the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe says, has become the "sacrament of our time".

 

Curator: Andrea Pacheco González