Dagoberto Rodriguez
Curated by Jérôme Sans

« We head out into space, ready for anything, which is to say, for solitude, arduous work, self-sacrifice, and death. Out of modesty we don’t say it aloud, but from time to time we think about how magnificent we are. In the meantime—in the meantime, we’re not trying to conquer the universe; all we want is to expand Earth to its limits. We see ourselves as Knights of the Holy Contact. That’s another falsity. We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. One world is enough, even there we feel stifled. »

Stanisław Lem, Solaris, 1961

For his first collaboration with Materia, Cuban artist Dagoberto Rodriguez presents TORMENTA SOLAR, his second NFT drop animation: a solar storm in the artist's distinctive aesthetic. Known for his futuristic visions built in Lego (utopian architectures, space shuttle corridors or neo-planets) the artist pursues his experiments with minting initiated with Otro Mundo, an audio-visual activation of his infinite tunnels in collaboration with composer Joan Valent. Following his meteorological warnings and speculative fictions on control technologies and facing urgency, the artist explores the crossing of these portals, an end to the tunnels. By imagining the possible end of his space mythology, he questions the impact of technology on humanity and its environment.

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The solar implosion is both real and metaphorical. Summoning the innocent and playful object of the Lego brick, the artist creates a formal strategy that detaches his works from the reality of their objects. The infinite tunnels, like an automatic scrolling feed, were themselves metaphors of the algorithmic bottomless pits conditioning human desire at the time of technocratic capitalism. In the logical continuation of the artist’s detached techno-criticism, the solar storm is the symbol of the immediate satisfaction created by such practices. The sun storm, dangerously seductive, acts as a gathering of glowing pixels rewarding internet or galaxy surfing previously embodied in the tunnels. Together, they form a loop of humanity’s chronic unsatisfaction. Easily fulfilled but always insufficient, our desire guided towards the light thrives for more, like mosquitos towards a lamp. From the next video on Tik-Tok and the next track to be discovered on Spotify to the next planet to be conquered, the scale matters less than the structure of our impulses.

In this explosion of plastic heat, the camera operates a movement that brings us closer to the explosion and allows us to distinguish the Lego bricks more clearly. Here the game, if it appears more reassuring than a real explosion, is no less pernicious. Voluntarily exposed as artificial, it takes up the subjectivation and the conditioning by the technological and capitalist logics that it originally denounces. Satisfied and cynical, we consciously fall into the trap like the one of an advertisement that never hides from trying to convince us. Tormenta Solar perpetually reaffirm its own logic. In this implosion, Dagoberto Rodriguez does not transport us out of the world nor does he predict its end. He mirrors our desires conditioned by the world we have built for ourselves.