ORNAMENT AND (IS A) CRIMEWith Ruben Santiago

Beginning with a guided tour to the exhibition “A Fire”, the artist Ruben Santiago invites us to think the relationships between art and ornament; ancestral relations, which persevere in contemporaneity all the same. The practices that avoided the decorative, consciously and voluntarily, became progressively assimilated by the art system. The relevance achieved by some of these esthetical operations, originally with emancipatory intentions, ended up generating a superabundance of formalist approaches. Minimalism served as the basis for the consolidation of a mute global ornament, of neoliberal character, inhabiting shopping centers, advertisements, screens, window fronts, and finds fertile ground in corporate aesthetics. We will then step out of Sismógrafo to find the street, the city’s infinite repository of graphic manifestations. What will CcSTOP’s (Stop Cultural Center) building facade tell us? With thin pens and tracing paper, we will trace and preserve the cultural remnants of “vandal” ornaments, the social and political imprints rising against an apparent cleanliness.

Ruben Santiago’s work (Sarria, Galicia, 1974) critically examines the mechanisms through which collective memory is formed and reflects on how institutions regulate the granting of symbolic value. Strategically embracing long-term processes and ongoing methodologies, Ruben materializes his practice as an expanded experience that permeates every aspect of his daily life. Public presentations of his work become instruments of negotiation through which he seeks to challenge and analyze definitions of the real. Ruben Santiago creates installations, site-specific projects, online mechanisms, video works, objects, publications, and other cultural artifacts. His work and his approach to the processes of meaning production constitute one of the most unique and significant paths of his generation. He has exhibited his work in international institutions, galleries, and independent spaces since the late 1990s.