Oscar Santillán is an artist whose practice is activated by curiosity as a method. He explores the intersections between science, ancestral knowledge, and the latent vitality in all forms of existence—even those considered inert. At the heart of his work lies the "Antimundo": a field of thought that proposes the coexistence of multiple realities within our planetary condition. His work projects Ecuador as a manifold territory: not fixed, but in constant transformation.
Video, sound, color, 8 min.
Crisálida, 2025
The images in the Antimundo series challenge the binary conceptions of “nature” and the “artificial” that we have inherited from Western scientists. Carl Linnaeus’s eighteenth-century Systema Naturae organized the world into animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, establishing taxonomic distinctions that still shape how life is classified today. Refusing these colonial distinctions, Santillán’s work insists that all ele-ments are part of a cosmic whole. Boundaries between territories break down in the Antimundo series, as the visual elements remain profoundly ambiguous.
Placenta, 2026
Taking computer motherboards, a computer’s primal circuit system, as its basis, the artist strips the machinery of its function by cutting away and sanding each of its components down until its surface reveals an uncharted landscape. Electronic nodes transform into mineral-like patterns, exposing what the artist calls a “technogeology.” The boards appear less as instruments of computation than as fragments of a new world, one shaped by a planetary transformation that shows us how incredibly sophisticated devices are metabolized back into raw matter.
Medulla, 2026
This installation forms a sculptural ecology animated by planetary vitality. Blister activates imaginaries integrating ambiguous “anomalies”: animal-plant entities are combined with pipes containing alien DNA (human genetic material modified with cosmological algorithms),and an aluminum structure that reactivates ancient comet iconographies.
Together, these elements evoke life as a continuum extending beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Drawing on the botanical abundance of the Chocó region, from Panama to Ecuador, as well as on the orchidarium tended by his parents and his exchanges with astrophysicists in the Netherlands, Santillán evokes a world in constant transformation, where intimacy, cosmology, and earthly desire converge.
