About
My work is shaped by a life marked by exile, movement, memory, and the search for home. Having lived across different cultures and geographies, I explore themes such as belonging, migration, inequality, fragility, and resilience — not only as personal experience, but as part of a wider human condition.
After many years of working internationally in the field of sustainable development, I felt the need to speak in a different language: one that could hold complexity, emotion, and contradiction more openly. Art became that space. Through materials, objects, and installations, I try to give form to what cannot easily be said in words — to memory, tension, vulnerability, and the invisible traces of lived experience.
I am interested in the quiet language of matter and in the encounter a work can create with the viewer. Rather than offering fixed answers, I hope my work opens a space for reflection: a moment to pause, to question, and to see oneself and the world from another perspective.
Bio
Artistic Process
Artistic Process
Diego Masera is a conceptual artist based in South Africa whose work across painting, sculpture, and installation is shaped by displacement, memory, and the enduring search for home. Forced into exile as a child during Argentina’s military dictatorship, he grew up in Mexico, where his early encounter with color, form, and cultural plurali
Diego Masera is a conceptual artist based in South Africa whose work across painting, sculpture, and installation is shaped by displacement, memory, and the enduring search for home. Forced into exile as a child during Argentina’s military dictatorship, he grew up in Mexico, where his early encounter with color, form, and cultural plurality first opened a path toward art. That experience of loss, movement, and adaptation left a lasting imprint on his practice, which continues to reflect on belonging, fragility, inequality, and human resilience.
Masera later studied in Italy before moving to Kenya, where an intended period of volunteer work became a decade of life and engagement in Africa. Over the years, he developed a parallel career in sustainable industrial development, working across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe on questions of material production, livelihoods, climate, and social transformation. He completed a PhD at the Royal College of Art in London, bringing critical reflection to the relationship between development, culture, and lived experience.
Today, fully committed to his artistic practice, Masera brings together a life lived across continents, disciplines, and histories. His work is informed by migration, social memory, and the tension between beauty and injustice, intimacy and structure, object and story. Through image, material, and space, he seeks to create works that speak quietly but insistently about dignity, coexistence, and the human need to imagine forms of home in a fractured world.
Artistic Process
Artistic Process
Artistic Process
Working across installation, sculpture, text, and spatial interventions, his practice reflects on belonging, displacement, inequality, and the symbolic weight of materials. His works often inhabit the space between biography and collective memory, where objects, structures, and gestures become carriers of social and emotional histories.
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Working across installation, sculpture, text, and spatial interventions, his practice reflects on belonging, displacement, inequality, and the symbolic weight of materials. His works often inhabit the space between biography and collective memory, where objects, structures, and gestures become carriers of social and emotional histories.
Rather than treating art as an isolated object, Masera approaches it as a field of relation: between people and places, memory and matter, fragility and endurance. His works open spaces for reflection on how histories are carried, how absence is made visible, and how the search for home and peace continues through material form.