Instopia is Diango Hernández’s artistic exploration of the dissolving boundary between the virtual and physical worlds. Originating as an Instagram-based project in 2015, it involved appropriating images of luxurious spaces found online and digitally inserting imagined artworks—paintings, murals, or sculptures—into them, creating convincing illusions that blurred reality and fiction. This act, deliberately transgressive of copyright and ownership, questioned the colonization of digital space and proposed that reshaping images and their embedded values could reshape cultural and social reality. By making viewers believe in these fabricated images, Instopia challenged them to reflect on how we interact with pictures in an era when images dominate both private and public life.
The project has since evolved into physical form, with Hernández presenting paintings and sculptures that originated as virtual interventions. These works, often articulated through his visual language of Waves, intertwine abstraction, Cuban revolutionary texts, and references to modernist figures such as Roberto Burle Marx, evoking both playful utopian aspirations and urgent messages of isolation. His sculptures, polished and hyperreal, appear as symbols of digital-era alienation, while simultaneously asserting the sovereignty of imagination to cross thresholds without regard for ownership or restriction. Ultimately, Instopia positions art as a realm beyond property, law, or even physical reality—an assertion that creativity, whether digital or material, operates in a dreamlike space that can reshape history itself.