Roberto Diago turns the Cuban Pavilion into a scarred counter-history of empire, labour, Black survival, and the human warmth missing from the polished machinery of the Venice Biennale.
Adilson De Oliveira
11 June 2026
To arrive at the Cuban Pavilion in Venice is already to understand something about power. You leave behind the manicured theatre of the Giardini, those neat little national fortresses erected during the high noon of empire, where countries with colonial money secured permanent real estate inside art history itself. Then comes the Arsenale: the old Venetian war machine reborn as cultural runway, its kilometres of brick corridors processing art with the rhythm of a luxury slaughterhouse.
And then, beyond the main bloodstream of the Biennale, past tourist drift, side streets and the slower pulse of Castello, you arrive at Cuba. Outside the permanent architecture of inclusion. Outside the official choreography of prestige.
This is where Juan Roberto Diago’s Hombres Libres / Free Men lands with force. The work refuses fantasy entirely. There is no postcard Havana here. No vintage-car nostalgia lacquered for European consumption. Diago presents scarred heads assembled from oxidised steel, salvaged timber, plastics, patched metals and remnants. They advance with the heavy authority of witnesses. Their surfaces resemble dockyards after rain, factory walls collapsing under salt air, fishing boats kept alive one season longer than they should be. Every seam remains visible. Every graft and fastening exposed. Most artists would conceal those joins. Diago turns them into scripture.
Diago was born into this history: grandson of Roberto Juan Diago Querol, a pioneering Cuban modernist, and raised in a family where art and music were working languages rather than decorative inheritance. But lineage did not arrive wrapped in velvet. It ran through Pogolotti, the impoverished Havana barrio where Black life, economic pressure and neglect were the weather of childhood.
By the time he graduated from San Alejandro in 1990, Cuba was standing at the edge of the Período Especial. The Soviet Union collapsed the following year and the island’s economic floor fell out. Paint, canvas, fuel, food, certainty — everything thinned. Scarcity became atmospheric. Diago absorbed that collapse into the work’s nervous system.
His practice belongs to a longer Afro-Cuban argument, running through Wifredo Lam, Grupo Antillano, and the modern era of resistance. He steps through the space they helped force open, then raises the temperature. His work says: look what history has done to us, and look what we have built anyway.
What stayed with me was Roberto Diago the man. In a Biennale ecosystem increasingly populated by artist brands, handlers, sponsors and curatorial middle management, meeting him felt disarmingly grounded. Quiet. Generous. At one point we laughed about the insanity of the enterprise: the crating of these gigantic heads, the impossible manoeuvring through Venetian alleyways, the forklifts, the sweating bodies required to keep the sculptures upright long enough for the art world to sip prosecco in front of them. What struck me was the humanity with which he spoke about the people behind them.
I come from printmaking, from years of stretching screens, pulling ink, exposing plates, carrying frames, cleaning the mess long after the “genius” had left the building. That labour existed like a haunting: present everywhere, acknowledged nowhere. We were basically Casper the Friendly Ghost with solvent stains.
Diago felt different. No false hierarchy. No performance of solitary brilliance. Assistants, movers, fabricators and handlers remained emotionally present inside the conversation itself. You could feel that these sculptures emerge from mutual reliance. From trust. From shared exhaustion.
Because labour saturates this pavilion. Actual labour. The choreography of hands. You can almost hear workshops echoing through the space: metal being cut, surfaces beaten into alignment, timber hauled into place. The sculptures refuse the fantasy of effortless art production so beloved by contemporary institutions. In an era where so much installation art arrives embalmed by fabrication companies and professionally erased labour, Diago keeps the evidence of making alive inside the work.
Crucially, he allows proximity. You can touch these sculptures. That detail sounds insignificant until you spend enough time inside the Biennale touching absolutely nothing. Everywhere else: barriers, alarms, immaculate surfaces terrified of contamination. Art behaving like overinsured handbags disguised as politics. Diago moves in the opposite direction. The roughness of oxidised steel, the grain of salvaged wood, the uneven skin of patched surfaces — the work invites bodily relation rather than policing it. Sculpture returns to contact.
Diago has been excavating this current since entering Havana’s contemporary art scene in the early 1990s, pushing beyond canvas and using found materials as social evidence. Rough planks, rusted iron, cobbled metal, discarded plastics, torn textiles: the exhausted debris of everyday survival. This scavenging becomes a form of material maroonage. A fugitive strategy. The maroon was never simply the escaped slave; the maroon built parallel worlds from debris, refuge from fracture, life from whatever history failed to destroy.
Diago’s sculptures operate within that same logic. Piece by piece, fragment by fragment, they seem recovered from the wreckage of empire itself. The patched surfaces and accumulated scars resist the poverty theatre Western audiences so often mistake for authenticity. They testify to making under the pressure of scarcity, embargoes, historical violence and fractured economies.
The figures emerge like bodies still negotiating the terms of personhood after centuries spent being reduced to cargo, labour, property, statistic. Free Men is therefore a deliberately uneasy title. Freedom here is maintenance: a daily act of reassembling the self against systems designed to fracture it.
This is why Diago’s placement outside the polished core of the Giardini and Arsenale feels so correct. A quiet fuck you to the selective amnesia of Venice itself. The city aestheticizes canals, masks and merchant glory while sanding away the machinery of trade, slavery, captive labour and empire that financed so much of that splendour. Diago carries the afterlife of Afro-diasporic survival directly into the lagoon’s bloodstream.
I found myself returning to the pavilion more than once, out of relief. Venice had begun wearing on me by then. Days inside the Biennale can produce a peculiar kind of spiritual dehydration: endless queues, polite indifference, transactional conversations disguised as networking, the soft hostility of spaces designed more for circulation than intimacy.
And then suddenly: Cuba.
Or perhaps more truthfully, something inside Diago’s pavilion reminded me of home. I sat with the sculptures and thought about Johannesburg: workshops, braais, neighbours leaning over fences, men repairing things with impossible ingenuity, the warmth of interruption, places where people still rely visibly upon one another to survive. Diago’s installation carried that atmosphere somehow. Spiritually familiar in the way only places shaped by pressure recognise one another across oceans.
There was community inside the work. Actual felt human closeness. Venice had started to feel beautiful but emotionally glacial. Diago’s pavilion broke that spell.
For the first time in days, I felt emotionally recharged enough to continue. That, honestly, is power. The ability for a work to momentarily return someone to themselves. In a Biennale overflowing with art desperate to smell politically important, Roberto Diago quietly accomplishes something far rarer: he restores the sensation of lived humanity.
Perhaps that is the real scandal of the pavilion. The scars are not symbolic decoration. They behave more like old railway lines across the surface of the sculptures: routes carved by pressure, movement, collision and survival. The marks tell you where history dragged its machinery. They refuse cosmetic closure. In most contemporary art, damage gets curated into atmosphere. With Diago, damage remains structurally load-bearing.
While much of the Biennale behaves like an immaculate showroom for politically scented furniture, Diago’s work still sweats. Still creaks. Still bears fingerprints. Outside the official architecture of cultural prestige, Cuba arrives welded together, and Diago leaves Venice looking exactly as it is: rich, haunted, and honking of shit.
Adilson De Oliviera joins the ART AFRICA team as a guest writer while taking up a long-term fellowship with the ART AFRICA Foundation. Working closely with Suzette and Brendon Bell-Roberts, he focuses on developing new outlets for critical art writing and helping to develop young voices within ART AFRICA’s Programme.
Adilson De Oliveira is a Johannesburg-born multidisciplinary artist, animator, and cultural practitioner whose work explores history, memory, and Luso-African identity through satire, technology, and decolonial critique. A Fine Arts graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand, he began as a printmaker before shifting toward a practice that treats machines as creative collaborators. Since co-founding The Magolide Collective in 2019, De Oliveira has used media such as drawing, video, XR, and AI to challenge the Western art canon and blur the boundaries between truth and fiction. His work serves as both a resistance and an archive, capturing the complex realities of postcolonial South Africa.
