Altar del Hombre (2024) by Juan Roberto Diago is a large-scale installation in mixed media on wood, comprising a sculptural ensemble of multiple human heads, container-boxes and volumetric constructs. Visually, the installation reads as an altar or sanctuary to “Man”: numerous busts, human fragments and modular units gather, stack and repeat, evoking simultaneously a memorial, a congregation and ritual architecture. The heads appear carved or assembled from reclaimed wood, with varied colored segments and panels, creating a complex texture that implies history, fragmentation and unseen testimonies.

The title Altar del Hombre explicitly alludes to the idea of offering, ritual or commemoration of the human subject—but not as an isolated individual, rather as a collective imbued with memory, historical burden and marginal presence. The altar here is no longer classical in religious sense, but becomes a symbolic space of contemplation of human-kind: its roots, its wounds, its resistances.

The voiceless heads, the modular repetition, the use of reclaimed wood and the monumental scale function as metaphors for historical invisibility, oppression, diaspora and the persistence of what has been silenced. Diago brings together these elements to construct a contemporary “altar”—a space inviting the viewer to confront the humanity left out of dominant narratives, the one enduring in the margins of history.