Migrants 2501
Askari Mateos

Alejandro Santiago (born in 1964) is originally from Teococuilco de Marcos Pérez, but left his hometown at the age of nine to complete his education in the city of Oaxaca. It was there he discovered that his interest was not in school, but in art, and it is this talent which has made him into one of the most renowned artists, with dozens of expositions in and out of the country.

He did not return to his homeland until ten years later, where he participated in a patron saint’s day ( June 29th, San Pedro Day); it took him another ten years to go back again and it was then that he realized that due to migration, many things had changed, most of all the architecture, “…now all of the houses are made of large grey bricks and they are two stories high, all of the rocky paths that I used to run down when I was a kid have disappeared.”

To Santiago, migration is a necessary evil of the system. “It’s an absurd necessary reality in societies, but it is the fault of the government for not implementing public policies to stop it.”
To the critics, it’s like going back and remembering the thousands of Terracota Warriors who were dug up from the Qin Shi Huang tomb; or the famous Moais, huge human sculptures made of rock that were discovered in the Easter Islands in 1722; perhaps also referencing the Atlantes of Tula, or the colossal Olmec heads, but the Migrants 2501 project in itself is an anthropological study and a manifestation of the highest humanistic sense, conceived out of a strong analysis of the social phenomenon of migration.
For this artist from the sierra, “it’s a tribute to those who have fallen in the line (of fire), a pride for those who are already there and discriminated against, and a reflection on those who stay where they are. “Every sculpture tries to reflect on every one of us with every one of them, naked as migrants, we as a part of the reality in which we are living.”

And in Oaxaca, Santiago sees a center of expressive arts in which “even though there are many very good artists, everything is spinning along the edge of a single cake. Oaxacan art is very special all over the world, but it continues to be only a luxury.” For Santiago, during one of his many reflections, he decided to go back to his hometown, more than a year ago, to find something different, something of his own: a form of art that goes hand in hand with history.

After a long journey replete with questions about technique, resistence, and color, Alejandro Santiago has created 300 pieces of art, but this number would be double were it not for the one day of rain that soaked an equal number of pieces that hadn’t yet been put in the oven, “…all I found after the rain was a huge pile of clay.”

The journey of the Migrants 2501 project has been tedious and has used up practically all of his savings, and at the beginning it was not easy to find the right type of clay; the kind that works best for the resistence in the work and in the ovens of Atzompa. This is why, he says, “I went to speak to the president of the municipality and told him about my project. I told him that I needed 400 tonnes.” His request was declined, they could not sell him this quantity of clay. Days later he went to San Bartolo Coyotepec, “… but the problem with that clay is that it is too fine and it doesn’t have the same resistance.”
It was the Zacateca ceramic artist named Adán Paredes who told him that in his homeland he could find the clay that he needed. Today, Alejandro Santiago pays 2,700 pesos per tonne of material that the Zacatecans bring him.

Now with enough clay, and after production of the first pieces, he realized that if he added color to them, the whole collection and the messages that went with it would be lost, because the color interfered with the lines of the work. Accordingly he decided to make three distinct series of sculptures, each one with it’s own unique tone but with no actual color whatsoever.

The finished pieces show strong symbolism. And apart from his hands, the artist uses other elements such huarache sandals, sacks, baskets, numbers and letters: death, life, infinity; finally, he even bites them, ties them, and highlights certain parts of them: “a lot of work and suffering go into making them, but it’s not so much shown in the actual image as in the textures of the work: the clay is skin, the clay is water, fire, earth, and wind.”
And so it is that the metaphysical part of the work is very beautiful, “…sometimes with friends – he remembers the time singer Lila Downs visited him – in between beers and mezcales, we would put some candles in a dark storage room and it looked as if the sculptures were moving.”

Up until this moment in time the artist has put all of his capital into this project and a few months ago he was even ready to sell his house if it was necessary. But he’ll no longer have to do so, because through painter Juan Alcázar, the Quetzalli gallery in Oaxaca and the Bond Latin gallery in San Francisco (U.S.A.), Santiago was given a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation so that he would be able to continue his project.

At the end of August Santiago will present part of the project (250 pieces) in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca (MACO). In the first months of 2006 he will take his work back to his hometown, Teococuilco de Marcos Pérez, where he will put the pieces, “one on the porch of every house, at the church, at the Palacio Municipal, at the cemetery, on the sidewalks, in the niches of the city, the idea is to fill up the town.”

For this first presentation, MACO will prepare a pamphlet which will include text from anthropologist Francisco José Cervantes Ruiz, in which he will analyze the social transcendence of the project. In addition, art critic Carlos Aranda will write about the value of the artistic significance of the pieces that make up the Migrants 2501 project.

Casa Lamm and the National Autonomy University of Mexico (UNAM) have already documented the project for review of its full implications regarding the actual production of the art and the phenomenon of migration in Oaxaca, respectively.

From the 21st of July, at the Diego Rivera Museum of Guanajuato, Alejandro Santiago is exhibiting his recent artwork; just a small offering of his pictorial work achievements.