2019
Tire, graphite and silver
Colombia’s history can be narrated through attempts to make sense of practices of precious materials appropriation and extraction . A process of extracting is inevitably entangled with mistreatment of surrounding environment, humans themselves included. Santiago’s work Puddle captures this in a poignant way. Artist uses a fragment of a found object – a discarded tire of a Caterpilar truck, one of many that is iconic of extractive industrial sights. The tire is cut in a way as it is commonly done by people inhabiting mine site surroundings. They tend to shape the exhausted rubber as a bucket for delivering water to cattle.
Santiago fills the tire with silver – one of the destructively desired precious metals – extraction of which goes hand in hand with deadly mercury pollution. Sheltered in a fragment of extraction industry leftover, a liquid shaped blob of silver rests there, uncannily resembling the evil sibling of extraction, making viewer get their guards up and test if by any chance they are not being exposed to poisonous vapor of mercury. The mineral becomes part of the social through reflecting image of the spectator to oneself, often decorated in silver. Puddle offers an experience of a narcissist gesture of leaning over a body of reflective surface, that might be as flattering, as deadly.
