Body, Bodies, Physical Bodies

Spoken Portraits Column.

By Daniel Santiago Salguero

_{1985 – 2085, installation, performance. Daniel Santiago Salguero. Artecámara, Bogotá, 2009. Photo archive DSS.}

Notes on the work of Daniel Santiago Salguero by Daniel Santiago Salguero in first person, viewing the body as an issue.

In a way, everything photographic is an exercise (in itself) of the body if considered as such—observing, adjusting, moving, displacing, or at least from my bodily awareness, this is how it happens (meaning the question of the body, bodies, corporeality has been there from the start of my career as an artist-photographer and has remained). I physically present myself (I appear in the images) in many of my works in the following years: Existí (2006), Los Hermanos Gemelos in its various versions (2007-2010), Tesoro, diálogo entre tiempos (2012).

_{Existí, artist’s book, video stills. Daniel Santiago Salguero. New York, 2006. Photo archive DSS.}

_{Existí, artist’s book, series of photographs and self-portraits. Daniel Santiago Salguero. New York, 2006. Photo archive DSS.}

_{Solo show Diarios Fotográficos Hermanos Gemelos Daniel Míope, Santiago Chapeu. Daniel Santiago Salguero. Itaú Cultural Center, São Paulo, 2007. Museum of the University of Pará, Brazil, 2008. Photo archive DSS.}

_{Tesoro, dialogue between times. Video 1 min 48 sec, loop. Created during a residency in Toronto in 2011 with a Canadian Indigenous community, presented in a group exhibition of Colombian artists at the York University Art Gallery in Toronto (AGYU), and at the 9th Mercosur Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2012. 3rd photo, Group exhibition Imaginary Homelands at AGYU. In the background, the installation is based on photographs and videos by Daniel. Daniel Santiago Salguero, Toronto, 2011. Works on tables, Mateo López. Photo archive DSS.}

It was perhaps during the Master’s in Interdisciplinary Theatre and Live Arts at the National University of Bogotá (which I pursued between 2011 and 2014) that I became aware of the body as a concrete theoretical and political field. I initially chose this program because the teacher José Alejandro Restrepo, who had already published his book Cuerpo gramatical: cuerpo, arte y violencia (Grammatical Body: Body, Art and Violence) (Universidad de los Andes Press, 2006), was teaching there. I also had professors like the Abderhaldem brothers from Mapa Teatro¹ (the program’s founders and other academics and playwrights). By then, I had been working on the theme of the body intuitively for years.

While living and studying in São Paulo (2007), I had access to contemporary performance, attending performance festivals and meeting some friends who would later become teachers and colleagues in this area. I remember, for example, a performance in São Paulo, a presentation that resulted from a study group I participated in, led by artist Dora Longo Bahia. For an event at an art school, we prepared a remake of Andy Warhol’s film Vinyl² (a performance that lasted the same length as the film—one hour—and was recorded in video, mimicking how Warhol filmed his movies). Later, I found out that the artist produced a film using this material under a grant (leaving the original audio of Warhol’s film superimposed on the video recording of the performance). She later sent me a copy of the DVD and the exhibition catalog in which she participated with this project. In the performance, my hair was shaved, milk was poured everywhere, we wore masks, a girl had her chest exposed (which was shocking for that place and time), and we played with chains, belts, and golf clubs—beyond the limits of order into total disorder, with hair in the milk, referencing Warhol’s film. Warhol pioneered experimental cinema alongside other greats like Jack Smith and Jonas Mekas.

_{Members of the study group in visual arts with Dora, students from her video class at the Faculty of Visual Arts at FAAP}³_{. Participation in a work by Dora Longo Bahía, Escola São Paulo, São Paulo, 2007. Photo archive DSS.}

That same year in São Paulo, I performed with some friends, though for us, it was private, but it was recorded on video. My idea was to place chairs against a wall, each symbolizing a moment of our individual lives, with a clock on the wall and a rope tied between two bricks, passing over six horizontally arranged chairs. I proposed individual one-hour sessions where each person sat in the chair corresponding to the moment in life they were supposed to experience (each chair had numbers inscribed, indicating a year and the age we would be or had been for that year—1985 0, 1998 14, 2007 22, 2023 38, 2036 51, 2056 71). We were all born in 1985. The action involved sitting naked individually for an hour while I filmed with a tripod, responding to a static horizontal composition. The gesture was beautiful; what happened to us was profound. The recording was in Mini DV format; we were about 22. Later, I turned this exercise into an artwork and exhibited it in Artecámara (2009) in Bogotá and in a solo show, Contando días terrestres (Counting earthly days) , at the AFA Gallery⁴ in Santiago, Chile (2011).

_{Counting Earthly Days, solo exhibition, Daniel Santiago Salguero, installation, photographs, performance, videos. AFA Gallery, Santiago de Chile, 2012. Photo archive DSS.}

The question of the body had already been forming in me for several years. In São Paulo, during the Verbo performance festival at Galería Vermelho⁵, I met a collective from Rio de Janeiro that, in one way or another, was also exploring the question of the body, experiential encounters, and the social. Their performances at that time focused on physical encounters between people to talk, exchange, celebrate, and party, depending on the piece. This collective is called Opavivará!⁶ and I have maintained a friendship with them for years. I still follow their work, which continues to address these themes; they recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of the collective with an exhibition in São Paulo. I accompanied them in New York a few years ago for their performance at the Guggenheim⁷ and CUNY⁸ (2017), and we held some activities during those days. Some of them stayed at my family’s house. I also introduced them to my new, diverse group of friends in the city, and we threw a party in a house in the South Bronx where I had been working with some of them on parallel projects about theater, video, and community at that time. The body, the corporeality, and the corporeal bodies continued to be a central theme of thought and action for us. We danced until late, and a member of Opavivará was the DJ. All of this reflects a thinking about the body that is very much applied to the social (political) realm, the possible well-being, and the notion of freedom. These are fields that concern us all.

This awareness of the corporeal also led us to work with the Sociedad Invisible Collective⁹ (2008–2013), where the question of the body was essential—for our bodies! We gathered to work on a magazine, Revista Invisible (Invisible Magazine) (on Latin American culture, of which we published two issues). Still, the project turned towards designing and producing performance festivals and art parties, with themes and content created by us and artists of that time. Though it may sound strange, almost everything was thought out from a bodily awareness. It was not accidental; there was a conscious idea of activating and questioning corporeality. It was a liberating process for all of us—liberating ourselves from the dogmatic, debilitating, and blinding aspects of our bodies. We took ownership of ourselves, and through that, our desires (that Foucaultian notion of desire—searching for and accepting the being we each are), and our awareness of our limits and care.

_{Carnaval Bacanal, poster, Pre-Carnival party of Barranquilla in Bogotá. Colectivo Sociedad Invisible, 2012. Photo archive DSS}

_{Ulysses Castellanos (Salvadoran artist) and Mateo Rivano (Bogotá) during an artist residency at AGYU}¹⁰ _{Toronto 2011. Ulysses later participated in the residency Residencia en la Tierra and exhibited a performance at the MAMU with a group of Latin American diaspora artists in Canada and Colombia. Photo archive DSS.}

Another essential element in my journey through this theme or these questions was the rural art residency I organized among several people, led by me, at a family farm in Quindío, Residencia en la Tierra¹¹ (2009–2014) (Residency on Earth), where the question of the body, corporeality, and corporeal bodies was also present—perhaps seen from different perspectives, such as food, for instance, or the slowing down of the body in the countryside, or the body’s relationship with plants, the night, water, or the sun. I was also a father by then, so all the biological aspects, like the transformation of our bodies, reproductive capacity, gender identity, etc., became of interest.

The residency involved several workshops on performance and contemporary theatricality, and it was vibrant and profound to discover and delve into these fields collectively. We lost our fear of our bodies, of shame, for example, shedding all those layers of guilt that come with this Latin American colonial culture. This contrasted even more with the cutting-edge information we brought with us and our guests about art theory, politics, materials, etc.

_{Resident artists from South Korea (traditional Korean music ensemble) and Josefina Astorga, a resident artist from Chile. Artist residency Residencia en la Tierra. Quindío, Colombia, 2012. Photo archive DSS.}

Regarding the very personal, when talking about body issues, politics, and feminism, I was a mother to my children, though an unusual one, since they already had a mother, and I was not that body. However, I felt a strong urge to be that mother—a maternal instinct at war with the rampant machismo of society, and with the recognition of this fact before myself, before my children’s mother (who, although supportive, felt competitive), and before the rest of the world—teachers, insurance office staff, customs agents, etc. For those who do not know me, going a bit further back, my gay partner and I had children with our best friend while working on the artistic residency project mentioned earlier. This was a radical decolonial gesture on our part, which sparked many discussions and confrontations.

In New York (2014–2018), I was able to investigate and immerse myself in new theoretical trends in body studies related to gender, sexuality, and health politics. In 2016, I realized that a new wave of feminism was emerging, related to specific issues, very far from classical feminism, under different dynamics, with much territory gained. Afro feminisms, feminisms of mothers who love their motherhood, feminisms of mothers who want to free themselves from the masculine violence culturally imposed by their families or even by themselves, feminisms for men who do not want to be as basic violent, superficial, and closed as traditional Western society proposes, feminisms for gays who want to be more or less women, feminisms to understand nature, the indigenous, or politics, fashion, and particular discourses. To name a few examples.

_{Flyer to an ‘open studio’. Model and artist Diego Olea. Studio of Daniel Santiago Salguero in the Palermo neighborhood, Bogotá, 2020. Photo archive DSS.}

I must develop the main idea of my work a bit more, Luciérnagas (2019). The learning I gained from it, or that we all gained from the process, was immense. The theme was sexual health politics, and my proposed work was about thinking of the body as a theoretical field but also from its most basic physicality and fragility. Meditating, lying down, walking, jumping, massaging, listening, dancing, etc. This social art laboratory, Luciérnagas, was realized as a residency project at Flora ars + natura¹² in collaboration with the Brazilian art and HIV platform Luv ’till it Hurts¹³ and the Colombian League Against AIDS, Ligasida. The result of the laboratory was a collective performance we presented at the Bogotá Botanical Garden one night on October 31st, a public event attended by hundreds of people. In short, the performance involved bodies containing fireflies (the people who took the laboratory, preparing and participating creatively and actively in the design of the action, wore black sweatshirts with green LEDs sewn into them, which glowed and turned off in the darkness like fireflies mating). It was while inhabiting a space like each person inside a nocturnal Amazonian jungle, emitting whistles from clay whistles. I was interested in studying and raising awareness about HIV/AIDS as a pandemic virus that wiped out a generation before mine. I felt or still feel, in debt to them, most of whom were artists or important writers whose work is a reference in my own. (The examples are endless, but let’s say Félix González-Torres, José Leonilson, the collective General Idea, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Luis Caballero, Reinaldo Arenas, Julio Cortázar, among so many others, so tragically)

_{Digitally intervened photograph, Luciérnagas project. Daniel Santiago Salguero, 2019. Meeting of artists concerned with and addressing migration issues, Melissa Guevara and her collective The Fire Theory and Curatorial Cinema from El Salvador, and migration and human rights expert lawyer Laura Echeverry (UNHCR), discussion session on borders at El Parche Artist Residency}¹⁴_{. Bogotá, 2019. Photo archive DSS}

_{Cortejo Nocturno, performance, photography. Luciérnagas laboratory. Daniel Santiago Salguero. Bogotá Botanical Garden, 2019. Photographs from that night by Simone Pateau and Faber Franco, digital work by Daniel Santiago Salguero. Bogotá, 2019. Photo archive DSS}

I want to talk about the continuity of these processes in the post-pandemic era. The confinement and the tremendous difficulties I went through made me much more radical in my ideas regarding my relationship with my own body, especially from the perspective of gender and sexual identity. More so after this experience with Luciérnagas, which overwhelmed me in every way; it gave me a lot of information and personal growth, I should say. I adopted a liberating attitude of exploration, unconsciously responding to everything I had faced the previous year and the new information. I believe this is evident in the two photo series NROP (2019-20) and Evolution of Gay (2024), where I present myself naked, but a much more naked version than a conventional nude, a total undressing, with fantasies, fears, identity crises, paranoias, defects, anxieties, nightmares, achievements, and possibly strengths, in self-portraits. In the second, Evolution of Gay, I synthesize all of this into a few photos with a cinematic effect. I gradually straightened up, eventually jumping in a way that showed I was comfortable, intense, and combative. I like that work and the capacity for synthesis in it. In a few gestures and with few symbols, I express everything I am feeling, from a body almost naked since, aside from the tattoos, jewelry, and the mohawk with bleached hair, I only wear a lace women’s underwear, a small women’s handbag, and men’s sports socks. I am delighted to see that it is a work that almost everyone I show it to likes because there is photographic conciseness, style, vulnerability, breaking boundaries, space for error, freedom, and all within the current art canons, including traditional ones, a conventional two-dimensional piece from a sequence of vertical photographs shown horizontally.

I also like that this work continues to be part of the same exploration I have been doing since the beginning of my career, among other things, the fact that I want to—and indeed manage to—move from the realm of the real to the artistic realm and from the artistic realm to the real one (what better window or threshold than the body for this). I think here about the capital issue of presentation—representation in photography, theater, and performance, and in the arts in general. A brilliant constant! As I mentioned, I must recognize it as one of my theoretical, political, and artistic achievements since I have not just stayed in theoretical talk, analysis, or mere representation.

All my works have involved a titanic effort that has positively transformed the lives of hundreds of people. My own life has also been altered, personally and satisfactorily.

_{Photo series NROP. 21 digital black-and-white and negative photographs. Daniel Santiago Salguero, 2019. Instituto de Visión Gallery. Bogotá, 2021. Photo archive DSS}

_{Happening or event Cereal Box Bridge. Daniel Santiago Salguero, a collection of cereal boxes collected from his home, glued together to create a 90-meter line for an event reflecting on the situation of migrants in the U.S.A. New York, 2017. Medium format analog photographs by Alejandro Jaramillo}.

I can’t stop talking about this topic without mentioning other essential projects and works from which I also learned and absorbed much information and experience. The theatrical collective I had for several years with two colleagues across Mexico, the USA, and Spain, Trip Trípode¹⁵ (2013-2016), the methodology I designed in Baja California, Mexico, along with one of them to implement in communities of women victims of violence, Memoria Léxica (2017-2025), which I have implemented several times in recent years, where we explore particular and collective memory through photographic thought technologies and the notion of archives to recognize, heal, and make ourselves aware of what has happened to us on a typical historical memory level, but also on a personal level. Other works and projects related to the concept of the body could be Fruits Tunnel (2018) related to food policies, Cereal Box Bridge (2018), or Pulpa de Rocoto (2020-2023), a chili brand I created as an artistic project to specifically discuss food and explore other forms of local or micro-economies that are fairer and more independent. I launched the product in a group exhibition on food made by artists, led by a collective of young women from Bogotá, Artist Breakfast Institute¹⁶, and the event took place at Espacio KB¹⁷ in 2021.

_{Chili project Pulpa de Rocoto, Daniel Santiago Salguero. Bogotá, 2021. Photo archive DSS}

In 2017, I participated in an event at NYU¹⁸ in the doctoral program of Performance Studies, where two presentations of my installation performance, Fuentes Puentes (2013–2017), were scheduled. This work had been presented more experimentally in Bogotá and Medellín in 2014 and had received exceptionally positive feedback. It is a piece about the recent history of violence in Colombia, based on the report ¡Basta Ya! from the Centro de Memoria Histórica de Colombia published in 2013, a serious and in-depth study about what has happened in Colombia from the 1950s until that moment, with graphs, photographs, and testimonies.

Perhaps this is the part in the text where I should say that all of my work (but especially the strength and intensity with which I do it) is a response to the complexity of the political-geographical territory in which I grew up, particularly to its thoughtless, deep-rooted, and normalized violence. I should note that I grew up in the 90s, very close to Medellín and Cali, where the most dangerous drug cartels, enemies of each other, were located. I faced the consequences of the war up close—kidnappings, murders, bombings, firecrackers, extortion, sexual violence, and a countless number of atrocities and the side effects of the social trauma that war brings. It is strange. I know this because I researched it for this work, Fuentes Puentes, and I have been internalizing and understanding it for years. However, when I show it to people who were also there, they can barely recognize what happened, what has happened, and what is still happening since it is all so abstract, mainly when lived firsthand and when layers of different conflicts accumulate and persist and even overlap until today. This is why I place such importance on memory. This is not just about the conflicts but also personal ones; I work on this in the workshops I mentioned earlier, Memoria Léxica.

_{Digital photographs printed on MDF. UV prints. Diptych, each piece 45 x 35 x 2 cm. Alien, symmetry of chaos. Daniel Santiago Salguero, Bogotá, 2017, Instituto de Visión Gallery}¹⁹_{. Photo archive DSS}

I must close by saying that although, as I demonstrated in the previous paragraphs, the theme of the body as such is consciously present in many of my works, it is not the theme on which my work is based, and perhaps there are other themes I have turned to more or that have had more presence throughout my career. Themes such as the intimate and subjective, the self-narrative of fiction or documentary, literature, gay love, collaborative aesthetics, the importance of the minor, themes in photography related to historical memory, gender or migration politics, and those that are historically and politically purely photographic, as well as the post-photographic.

_{Self-portraits Evolution of Gay work, photographs 2024. Printing laboratory process. Bogotá, 2024. Photo archive DSS}

1. Mapa Teatro. Mapa Teatro is an artists’ laboratory dedicated to transdisciplinary artistic creation. It has been based in Bogotá since 1986. ↩︎
2. Vynil. Experimental black-and-white film made in 1965 and directed by American artist Andy Warhol at The Factory. ↩︎
3. FAAP. Centro Universitário Armando Álvares Penteado, São Paulo. ↩︎
4. Galería AFA. Founded in 2005, AFA is a physical and virtual space dedicated to the management, production, diffusion, and sale of contemporary art projects in Santiago, Chile. ↩︎
5. Galería Vermelho. Founded in São Paulo in 2002, this gallery represents various generations of Latin American artists. ↩︎
6. Opavivará!. Collective of Carioca artists who create actions in public spaces, galleries, and cultural institutions. Their work has been characterized by creating collective and participatory experiences since 2005. ↩︎
7. Guggenheim. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. ↩︎
8. CUNY. City University of New York. ↩︎
9. Colectivo Sociedad Invisible. An art collective that existed between 2008 and 2013. They published the Latin American cultural magazine Invisible and organized numerous cultural and artistic events and projects under the same focus. ↩︎
10. AGYU. Art Gallery of York University in Toronto. ↩︎
11. Residencia en la Tierra. International rural artist residency project operated between 2009 and 2014. The residency occurred in the rural area of Montenegro, Quindío, Colombia. ↩︎
12. Flora ars+natura. International artist residency that operated in Bogotá between 2013 and 2020. ↩︎
13. Luv till it hurts. An international platform led by artists about HIV and stigma, managed and created in São Paulo. ↩︎
14. El Parche Artist Residency. International art residency in Bogotá and Oslo from 2007 to the present ↩︎
15. Trip-Trípode. A transdisciplinary arts and expanded theatre collective created in 2013 until 2016, it initially occurred in Bogotá and then virtually between Baja California, Barcelona, and New York. ↩︎
16. Artist Breakfast Institute. Bogotá-based collective created in 2020. ↩︎
17. Espacio KB. Independent cultural space. Opened in 2015, it developed a multidisciplinary environment for art and parties in San Felipe, Bogotá. ↩︎
18. NYU. New York University. ↩︎
19. Galería Instituto de Visión. Founded in 2013, Instituto de Visión is a gallery focused on conceptual practices led by women. Originally located in Bogotá, it is now in New York. ↩︎