November 11, 2009:

emelie, the journal will begin tomorrow, I recommend you to print every page and paste it on a wall, let see what happens.

I`m happy we met…

Crazy things happening everyday … daniel.

Chance meetings and strange encounters: these are the adventures of Daniel Santiago. He’s an artist living in Colombia on the quest to find fiction’s ending…but this is just the beginning of the story. He documents his real-life adventures in diaries that act as oblique self-portraits, framed by fictions he creates and vice-versa. And the story continues. Before Daniel Santiago got his internet cell phone, these diaries-cum-self-portraits usually took the form of a book of images and text, for instance, The Adventures of Daniel and Santiago which charted the life of identical twins Daniel and Santiago on their quest to find out their fiction – the author of their story – who was, in fact, the real Daniel Santiago.

The twins were two sides of the same person, a person with two first names and a self-portrait of Santiago’s travels through South America. (Daniel incidentally has just recently had twins himself… with fiction now framing his real life!)

Now armed with an internet cell phone, Daniel Santiago has set out to create a real-time diary of his life that connects three places in the Americas: Toronto, Canada, Santiago, Chile, and Sao Paulo, Brasil. This studio blog is a day-by-day account of Daniel’s adventures sent to Emelie Chhangur (AGYU, Toronto), Irene and Elodi (Galeria Afa, Santiago) and Marina Buendía (Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo): surreal and beautiful images, one a day, everyday, since November 2009 that form an ongoing, daily internet encounter that by chance bring these four people together. Staircases that go no place, representations of man-made and natural energy, pruned humans, and pedestrian spirals—images that represent Daniel but also symbolically speak about the nature communication and technology. Here, you can take the journey through Daniel’s year-long image journal – lasting from November 12, 2009 through November 11, 2010.

Daniel Santiago is an artist based in Colombia. He studied Audio Visual Media with an emphasis on photography at the Polytechnical University Grancolombiano in Bogota, Colombia from 2003 – 2008 and participated in a photography residency at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2006. Santiago’s work has been featured in a number of solo and group exhibitions throughout South America and abroad. He often works collaboratively with other artists and writers to produce platforms for the research, creation, and dissemination of contemporary Latin American art such as the publication Revista Invisible and the Residencia en la Tierra, a residency program that supports workshops, collaborations, and other artistic manifestations, located in Napoles, Montengro, Quindío, Colombia, a remote, and beautiful, setting about four hours from Bogota.

“La Residencia en la Tierra (residency of the earth) is a space that receives people from the entire world who are interested in the processes of artistic creation and contact with nature. La Residencia en la Tierra provides a productive environment for the exchange of ideas, the development of projects,  concentration, reflection, and rest.” (from the website)

Daniel and Emelie hope to create a residency exchange between Colombian and Canadian artists at the AGYU and Residencia en la Tierra under the theme of Imaginary Homelands. Keep posted for future developments. They are both grateful for chance meetings and strange encounters.