Oscar Santillan

Oscar Santillán (born 1980, Ecuador) is a visual artist, cybernetician, and writer who lives between The Netherlands and Ecuador. His practice emerges from the notion of 'Antimundo' which he understands as "a way of identifying and generating realities that do not fit in the world". For this purpose he has resorted to forms of knowledge production and imaginaries overlooked by mainstream Western thinking such as cybernetics, science-fiction, Andean and Amazonian cosmologies, a more inclusive history of science, and plant intelligence. This 'Antimundo' toolbox is complemented by emerging fields, currently disrupting modern paradigms, such as AI and synthetic biology.

Santillán's 'Antimundo' can be perceived in projects such as 'Baneque' (2016); 'Solaris' (2017), which mixes Soviet sci-fi and Andean cosmology; 'A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History' (a series started in 2018); 'Spacecraft' (2018); 'How Rivers Think' (2019); and 'Chewing Gum Codex' (2020).

A work of Santillán, 'The Intruder' (2015), stirred a [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/27/stone-mountain-peak-gallery-art-vandalism-scafell-pike-oscar-santillan heated controversy] in England as the artist claimed to have shrunk the country by one inch after (allegedly) stealing one inch off the top of its highest mountain.

In early 2021 Santillán was announced as one of the five artists commissioned by the [https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/programs Holt/Smithson Foundation] to create a new project for an island acquired by Robert Smithson in 1972. The other four artists are Tacita Dean, Renée Green, Sky Hopinka, and Joan Jonas. Provided by Wikipedia