With [sculpture trail], Luxembourg Art Week brings together a selection of works and installations presented in open air. Their placement traces a route through the city, inviting encounters with art along the streets, in everyday journeys and places.
[sculpture trail] benefits from the generous support of the City of Luxembourg.
With the support of Lëtzebuerg City Museum
Dagoberto Rodríguez
Bloque series, 2023
Steel, variable dimensions
Presented by VF Art Projects
Location
Lëtzebuerg City Museum
14, rue du Saint-Esprit
L-1475 Luxembourg
Bloque is an outdoor sculpture proposal conceived for a public space intervention, that explores the relationships between play, architecture, memory, and politics. The proposal consists of a group of large-scale modular sculptures constructed from geometric blocks that evoke LEGO construction systems, whose discovery by Dagoberto Rodríguez after his first trip outside Cuba represented an aesthetic and conceptual revelation.
In these works, play functions as both a formal and conceptual trigger, though not from an innocent perspective. The playful becomes a deeply political territory: a system capable of imagining worlds, ordering chaos, and proposing alternative realities. The modular language—close to the logic of the pixel—allows for the construction of open structures that refer both to childhood games and to the principles of modern urbanism.
The Bloque series connects this playful experience with a recurring reflection in the artist's practice: architecture understood as a form of memory and as an expression of ideology. Drawing from the memory of the four corners of his house in Caibarién, Cuba, the artist reconstructs fragments of an intimate and affective architecture that expands into a collective dimension. The sculptures evoke corners, towers, or incomplete structures, suggesting buildings under construction or in transformation.
The block thus appears as a minimal unit of construction, but also as a metaphor for the individual within a larger system. Installed across different points of the site, the sculptures generate a spatial journey in which landscape, architecture, and geometric abstraction enter into dialogue.
The project proposes imagining public space as an experimental territory where childhood, memory, and politics intertwine in order to reflect on the construction—and possible deconstruction—of contemporary ways of inhabiting space. Through these modular architectures, the Bloque series invites visitors to reflect on how our cities, our identities, and our ways of imagining the future are built.
Biography
Dagoberto Rodríguez Caibarién, Las Villas, Cuba, 1969) is one of the most internationally recognised Ibero-American contemporary artists and a founding member of the influential collective Los Carpinteros (1992–2018), co-founded while studying at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana, from which he graduated in 1994. The collective gained worldwide recognition, including participation in the Venice Biennale in 2005, and became known for its unique fusion of art, architecture, design, and political commentary.
His work has been exhibited in major museums and cultural institutions around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York; Tate Modern in London; Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, among many others. His works are also part of prestigious international collections.
Through sculpture, painting, installation, video, architecture, and design, Rodríguez creates visually striking works that combine humour, irony, and poetic symbolism to address themes such as globalization, migration, power, politics, and everyday life. Since the 1990s, he has lived a nomadic existence across Havana, Los Angeles, New York, and Madrid, experiences that have deeply informed his artistic vision and understanding of cultural identity. As he states, "Immigration has become part of our identity. We carry on being Cuban even when we're living in separate geographies."
Although Los Carpinteros dissolved in 2018, Rodríguez continues to embrace collaboration as a fundamental aspect of his practice, considering visual art an inherently collective discipline. His creative process is rooted in dialogue, co-creation, and interdisciplinarity, with watercolour playing a crucial role as a tool for developing, recording, and revising conceptual ideas. His work follows metaphorical and symbolic paths while maintaining a strong engagement with the political sphere through what he describes as "poetic activism": the belief that art may not directly change governments, but can shape public consciousness and provoke critical reflection.
Discover the ART WALK by downloading the map here.
