Residence from mid-September to mid-December 2018
Born in 1970, he lives and works in Mexico City.
Santiago Borja's work lies between art, architecture and anthropology. His approach is based on these three disciplines, and he succeeds in establishing unexpected or unexplored connections based on subjective associations.
For his residency project, Santiago Borja took over the space of the studio by installing a complex wooden structure covered by a woollen carpet.
This structure was designed based on the totemic connections of filiation symbolised by the diagram "Totemic Operator", published in Claude Levi-Strauss's book "La pensée Sauvage" (1962). With the installation of this installation in the studio, Santiago Borja also induces a cultural telescoping with the carpet. Created as part of an ancestral weaving practice, the motifs on this carpet are taken from a repertoire of traditional Mexican shapes and colours, combined with those developed by the Bauhaus weaving workshops at the beginning of the 20th century.
Santiago Borja does not wish to oppose the different cultures to which he refers, but rather to contaminate them, in order to reinvest their meaning on both sides.
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