TAMAYO SOLER, Santiago

SAN ISIDRO LABRADOR: Rituales para Invocar el Agua
Launched October 8, 2025

SAN ISIDRO LABRADOR: Rituales para Invocar el Agua is inspired by François Morelli’s 2018 performance for the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, Mari usque ad Mare / D’un trou d’eau à l’autre / Piss and Vinegar. Performed by Javi Fuentes Bernal, the video unfolds in a dystopian Bogotá, tracing the passage of a solitary figure through nine abandoned downtown fountains. Each stop becomes part of a search for water, guided by improvised ritualistic gestures and prayer. Using some of Morelli’s original performance materials, “SAN ISIDRO LABRADOR: Rituales para Invocar el Agua” explores digitization of performative actions through looping, fragmentation, and morphing to construct long, slow, and meditative scenes.

San Isidro Labrador — Saint Isidore the Labourer — was a Spanish farmer canonized in 1622 who is revered as the patron saint of farmers and labourers. Across the Americas, he is invoked during times of drought with prayers that the rains may fall and the land may be restored. His veneration has also been absorbed into syncretic traditions, where figures imposed through colonial Catholicism have been re-appropriated and re-signified. In Colombia, devotion to saints often moves beyond formal Catholic practice, merging with popular rituals, magic, and everyday forms of spirituality to form a living system of belief shaped by resilience, adaptation, and layered inheritances.

Santiago Tamayo Soler (he/him) is a Colombian-Canadian artist based in Montréal whose practice primarily unfolds through video. With a background in performance art and film, he holds a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University. His work focuses on world-building, creating digitally constructed universes interwoven with archival materials such as video, photography, and found online imagery. Through these virtual environments, he reflects on Latin American identity from a diasporic perspective, often using the visual language of video games, telenovelas, and digital cartography as narrative frameworks. These formats become portals for speculative storytelling, imagining futures rooted in radical fantasy. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Art and/or Game: Symbiosis or Dissonance? at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris (2023), A psionic hope, an astonishing dream at Trinity Square Video in Toronto (2023), and Prémonitions: Immersions & Récits with Massivart + Chromatic Festival in Montréal (2023). His work Recado was featured in Sunrise, Sunset at Bradley Ertaskiran in Montréal (2023). His first solo exhibition, Veneno en la Sangre, opened at Centre Clark in January 2025. Tamayo Soler received the 2023 EDAA Emerging Digital Artists Award presented by EQ Bank and Trinity Square Video. He was the 2024 artist in residence at the Montréal Fine Arts Museum as part of Impressions and has participated in residencies at Dazibao (2022, online) and the PHI Foundation (2021). In May 2024, he was named a laureate of the MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award 2025, with an accompanying exhibition at the MNBAQ in February 2025 presenting his most recent work, Postales.

References/Resources

The following references were cited by Santiago Tamayo Soler and François Morelli in their TPAC interview:

The performer in SAN ISIDRO LABRADOR: Rituales para Invocar el Agua: Javi Fuentes Bernal
Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky on Art as Prayer: see excerpt from the 2019 documentary Andrei Tarkovsky: A Cinema Prayer
Robert Smithson’s idea of the Non-Place: see pages 4a and 4 of Earth Art symposium transcript, Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University (February 6, 1969). Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Box 2, Folder 48.

To hear François Morelli speaking more about Mari usque ad Mare / D’un trou d’eau à l’autre / Piss and Vinegar, see his 2018 Performance Art Daily artist talk with Arahmaini, moderated by Paul Couillard.