SANTOS | My Site

SANTOS

SAINT

This work was created in collaboration with Santos Hernández from Chamula—the protagonist—Baha Al-Zain from Jordan/Palestine, the EZLN community of Elambo, and EDELO. Together we created a mythical public spectacle that explored our need to generate new myths capable of holding the layered realities of disability, autonomy, violence, cultural appropriation, and colonialism.

The body and the subconscious carry the wounds inflicted by the systems that shape our lives. To begin decolonizing the generational trauma of white supremacist and ableist ways of thinking, we felt compelled to collectively embody those histories rather than simply speak about them. Through ritual, symbolic action, and shared performance, we transformed inherited violence into something that could be witnessed, mourned, and reimagined. This communal act of acknowledgment and blessing became a way of creating our own mythology.

The performance unfolded between two parallel narratives: a violent burial and the emergence of Santos as a warrior deity. Throughout the process, Santos shaped his own representation, selecting his Mayan warrior regalia and determining which costumes, objects, gestures, and actions felt authentic to his experience. Every decision was guided by his understanding of his body, his ancestry, and the Indigenous histories of the broader community, allowing the work to resist imposed narratives in favor of self-determined mythmaking.

Edición de cortometraje *** ALFREDO SALOMON ***. Audio por *** Guillermo Galindo ***

The creation of this work was deeply organic in nature. Every collaborator brought their own direction and understanding of where the piece wanted to go, yet somehow it all converged. By the final day of the performance, we entered the experience as if we were figures inside an actual dream—enacting our inherited traumas and desired hallucinations, then transforming them through a shared symbolic language. It felt as though we had created a kind of dream telepathy, where potent images emerged from one person's subconscious and were instinctively recognized by the others. In that overlap, a collective, non-linear form of healing became possible.

The work seemed to function across cultures with equal potency for everyone involved, each person connecting to it through a different constellation of meaning. My own ancestors were killed by the Nazis for being Jewish Gypsies in Eastern Europe, so the position of the bodies immediately formed a swastika in my mind. Through that image I was able to travel toward an ancestral wound, confront it, and release some of its weight. Santos and members of the Elambo community connected the dismembered limbs to the Mesoamerican goddess Coyolxauhqui. Baha Al-Zain, a performer from Palestine, related the work to the demonization and resistance of his people. The piece continues to operate this way in exhibition. A Tibetan visitor told me it carried deep cultural significance because it reminded him of the Tibetan Buddhist sky burial ceremony.

Working within our collective subconscious holds a depth of meaning I am only beginning to understand. When we loosen our grip on a fixed reality, we enter a space where symbols become shared rather than owned, where they can move freely between histories, cultures, and bodies. In that place, the heart of life becomes the force that can alchemize us beyond the pain of our perceived separation.