I am a Cold War product.Dagoberto Rodríguez
Information used to be scarce. Now we are drowning in it.
That contrast sits at the heart of my conversation with Cuban artist Dagoberto Rodríguez and Violeta Frank, founder of Luxembourg-based VF Art Projects, ahead of Rodríguez’s first solo exhibition in Luxembourg, Broadcasting the Unknown.
Rodríguez grew up in Caibarién, Cuba, in the 1970s. His father was an active member of the Communist Party, yet at night listened to the Spanish-language broadcasts of Voice of America.
For the young Rodríguez, information felt precious.
“At that time, information was really, really important for us,” he told me. “It’s not like now, that we are confused about the amount of information that we have.”
That childhood tension between what we see, what we are told, and what might exist beyond our field of vision has stayed with him ever since.
Rodríguez also grew up in a world where objects were frequently made rather than bought.
He remembers Cuban children being allocated just three toys a year, one important toy and two cheaper ones. For much of the rest of the year, children made things themselves.
Growing up beside the sea, surrounded by workshops repairing large wooden ships, he turned scraps of wood and cork into miniature boats.
That physical relationship with materials later became central to his art.
That relation with my hands, as an adult, as an artist, provided me the security to do things with my own hands.Dagoberto
At art school, Rodríguez and Alexander Arrechea began making work from wood. People started calling them Los Carpinteros, “The Carpenters”. At first, Rodríguez admits, they wanted a grander name.
Eventually they realised that the accidental name was almost perfect.
It positioned them somewhere between craftspeople and artists, observers who could enter the art world from an unexpected direction. The collective would go on to work together from the early 1990s until 2018 and become internationally renowned.
Rodríguez believes the restrictions they experienced in Cuba helped shape their creative language.
“Sometimes censorship and limitation make you better,” he said, because artists are forced to experiment, search for different materials and find less direct ways of expressing difficult ideas.
For Rodríguez, art requires something deeper than technique.
You need to have an obsession. You need to have a problem.Dagoberto
Violeta Frank arrived through a very different door.
Born in Argentina, she studied law because she originally envisaged a diplomatic career. Once immersed in the subject, she discovered that she genuinely loved it.
But by her thirties another world was beginning to pull.
Friends working in major productions gave her a glimpse behind the scenes. Others introduced her more deeply to contemporary art. Slowly, the certainty of a legal career gave way to the possibility of something more creative.
“I didn’t see myself forever being a lawyer.”
Together with another lawyer, she founded the Melian Foundation for Latin American Art and Culture. Her description of that decision is one many career changers will recognise.
Let’s jump into the pool, even if we don’t know if there’s water there.Violeta Frank
Yet the lawyer never really disappeared.
Negotiation, organisation, communication and the ability to hold her ground all became useful tools in producing increasingly ambitious art projects.
Frank eventually moved to Europe, founded VF Art Projects in Luxembourg and began creating a bridge between Ibero-American artists and European audiences, while also taking Luxembourgish artists abroad.
And how did she first approach Rodríguez? Instagram.
He initially thought the message looked suspicious.
From an Instagram message during the pandemic came studio visits, conversations about Jorge Luis Borges, friendship, and eventually Broadcasting the Unknown.
The Luxembourg exhibition seems almost uncannily suited to Rodríguez.
Frank can see the historic RTL antennas at Junglinster from her gallery. Around 12 minutes away lies Betzdorf, home to one of the world’s great centres of satellite communications.
One landscape contains the history and future of broadcasting.
Rodríguez’s terracotta satellites sit directly inside that story.
Clay, he points out, carries some of humanity’s earliest written messages. Now he uses that ancient material to recreate one of the defining technological objects of the modern world.
His fascination with space also stretches back to childhood. Born in 1969, the year humans first walked on the Moon, Rodríguez grew up following the Soviet space programme from Cuba.
Today his questions are less about conquest and more about dependence.
Satellites shape banking, navigation, communication, surveillance, and much of our daily lives, often invisibly.
We don’t have a real idea of the impact of these devices in our everyday life.Dagoberto
His landscapes similarly challenge the old idea of simply standing before a view and painting what the eye sees. We now see Earth through satellites, thermal cameras, digital sensors, and machines orbiting hundreds of kilometres above us.
Technology has acquired its own eyes.
Then comes my favourite idea in the exhibition: The Gymnasium of Thought.
Inside the former church at Al Kierch in Roodt-sur-Syre stands something resembling a gym or temple devoted to physical exercise.
Rodríguez developed the idea after reading philosopher Byung-Chul Han and thinking about a society increasingly focused on the exterior body.
We can calculate our calories. We measure our sleep. We know which supplements or exercises might build muscle.
But what builds the mind?
Rodríguez put it beautifully:
You know perfectly the amount of calories you need for living... but people don’t know what book you need to grow, to develop your mind.
His answer to becoming intellectually fitter is disarmingly simple. Read.
His mother, a nurse who collected books in the hope of eventually finding time to read them, introduced him to Dostoevsky. Years later, her influence remains present in an installation encouraging others to rediscover literature.
Rodríguez half-jokingly describes the work as “marketing for books”, a nostalgic defence of a world of knowledge increasingly pushed aside by screens.
The exhibition also raises another important cultural question for Luxembourg: why should ambitious art remain concentrated in capital cities and conventional museums?
Broadcasting the Unknown stretches across two unusual locations, the former church at Al Kierch in Roodt-sur-Syre and the Annexes of Château de Bourglinster. Frank deliberately champions projects in non-traditional spaces.
“They have such a magic that you cannot find in a contemporary building,” she said.
Rodríguez agrees. Artists, he argues, cannot spend their lives waiting to be discovered by museums.
“We have a short life,” he said. “We cannot be waiting for a museum to discover us.”
Perhaps that is the deeper message running through this conversation.
Make things. Question things. Find another route. Read. Think. Collaborate. Look again.
For Frank, art has become essential precisely because the world feels increasingly difficult.
Art brings us beauty, brings us light, brings us reflection. We talk about reality in a different way.Violeta
And after leaving law for this uncertain new world?
“I cannot conceive my life without art right now.”
Dagoberto Rodríguez
24 October to 29 November 2026
Locations:
Al Kierch, Roodt-sur-Syre
Annexes of Château de Bourglinster
Opening hours: Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, 11am to 7pm
VF Art Projects
Instagram: @vf.art.projects
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vf-art-projects/
Violeta Frank
Instagram: @violetaafrank
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/violeta-frank-00050223/
Dagoberto Rodríguez
Instagram: @dago_rodriguez_carpintero
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dagoberto-rodriguez-9381933a/
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