2022
Talel Until the Songs Spring
Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy 2022
2010
Fort/Da
Neutra VDL-Research House II, Los Angeles, CA, U.S. 2010
In 2010, Santiago Borja worked on the roof of the VDL Research House II, an iconic Californian villa built in Los Angeles by the architect Richard Neutra in 1965. By literally transforming the modernist architecture into a loom, Borja used the beams of the pergola on the terrace as a structure for suspending long warp threads, which, in their turn, would accommodate the weft threads of a large textile piece.
2010
Divan : Free Floating Attention Piece
Freud Museum, London, U.K. 2010
In 2010, Santiago Borja worked in the London apartment of Sigmund Freud, where the father of psychoanalysis, after fleeing Nazism in 1938, spent the remainder of his life. During the exhibition, the artist covered the Persian carpet of the famous sofa with fabric and cushions woven by Wixariki women. This indigenous Mexican community (also called Huichol) is known to have resisted Catholic evangelism.
2014
Sitio
Villa Savoye, Poissy, France 2014
The Sitio project offers a fascinating image which becomes instinctively lodged in the memory, introducing the visitor to the evocative power of Santiago Borja’s works, and their ability to produce new ground-breaking narratives.
The Villa Savoye, which was built between 1928 and 1931, illustrates the principles of modern architecture (the “International Style”) which, as drawn up in those years by Le Corbusier, could be applied here, there and everywhere, regardless of distinctive local features and elements.
2015
Suprasensitive
Mies Van Der Rohe Pavilion Barcelona, Spain 2015
Super-sensitive is an artistic research project developed by the Mexican artist Santiago Borja since 2015, taking the form of different in situ works which all connect architecture with the “infravisible”.
In 2015, Santiago Borja worked in the emblematic Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, built for the German contribution to the 1929 International Exposition held in Barcelona. This time around, his project had to do with the place of the human body in modernist architecture.
2016
A Mental Image : Blavatsky Observatory
Sonneveld House, Amsterdam, Netherlands 2016
The Project A Mental Image by Mexican artist and architect Santiago Borja consists of the installation of a temporary observatory based on theosophical principles on the rooftop of the Sonneveld House. A Mental Image – Blavatsky Observatory is based on Borja’s research into the influence of Western esotericism on the principles of Dutch Functionalism.
2016
Everything Falls Into Place When It Collapses
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona, U.S. 2016
Everything Falls into Place When It Collapses is Santiago Borja’s site-specific project in response to the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument – a Southwest icon of Native American culture – and its complex history within the national cultural politics of the U.S. over the past 125 years.
2013
Jung-Catcher
Frac Grand Large – Hauts-de-France Dunkerque, France 2020 MARCO, Monterrey, México 2013
JungCatcher is an installation which encompasses the conceptual, poetic and visual approach developed by Borja around magical thinking, here symbolized by the Amerindian dream-catcher, and modern thinking, in the tangible form of a personality diagram invented by the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.
2019
Totemic Sampler
Atelier Calder, Saché, France 2019
Wavering between shelters and textile wrapping, Totemic Sampler deals with a fundamental theme in architectural theory–the theme of its origins. The nomadic wooden structure is covered with a large patchwork of “sarapes”—pieces of Mexican fabric—whose motifs are mixed with those modernist motifs developed by the Bauhaus weaving workshops in the early 20th century.
2019
Cosmic Sampler
Bienal d’Orléans, Orléans, France 2019
Cosmic Sampler is a large-dimension architectural / textile structure, developed specifically for the Orleans Architecture Biennial. The shape and design is the result of the collaboration with a a Huichol marakaame. This geometric structure creates a three-dimensional platform, which can be used for sitting or lying down.
2012
Cosmic Tautology
With this diptych, Santiago Borja continues his rereading of the iconic works of Western culture. These two rugs are a response from the Mexican artist to minimal American art, to his abstract language based on the experimentation of an ‘objective’ painting, emptied of all references and deliberately ‘tautological’ – which talks of nothing other than that which is stated and «where you find nothing other than that which can be seen there» (Franck Stella).