SARA GARZÓN
Óscar Santillán: What Does It Feel Like to Be Earth
Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Quito, Ecuador.
2026
In Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, the philosopher Vilém Flusser wrote about the vampire squid, a deep-sea creature endowed with a strange metabolism and a sensory system similar to that of the octopus. By imagining a form of life radically different from our own, this abyssal being compels us to reconsider the various ways in which life manifests on our planet. In his account—part speculative biology, part philosophical treatise Flusser explores the limits of scientific objectivity and questions the assumptions inscribed in modern Western systems of knowledge. The philosopher underscores, again and again, how much of what we understand as human exceptionalism dissolves once we recognize the traits we share with other forms of life such as genetic, morphological, existential, and how we, too, are marked by otherness, by our own limits, and perhaps by our own fading away.
In tune with this mode of scientific fabulation, Ecuadorian artist Óscar Santillán (b. 1980) works from a speculative framework that destabilizes fixed definitions of knowledge. His practice explores the porous boundaries between technology, ecology, and cosmology, transforming scientific data, natural phenomena, and imaginary narratives into poetic inquiries into planetary interdependence and posthuman imagination.
Santillán’s projects often begin with research that includes scientific experiments, archival fragments, and oral histories, but they rarely remain within disciplinary boundaries. On the contrary, they unfold as fictions. Here we find installations that intertwine astronomy with Andean cosmology; sculptures that embody speculative ecologies; videos that revive histories suppressed by official accounts. His works propose tools for thinking otherwise, contaminating dominant narratives, activating forms of knowledge labeled as “peripheral,” and allowing curiosity to reorder the world.
What Does It Feel Like to Be Earth is Santillán’s first institutional solo exhibition in Ecuador. The show revisits key projects from the artist’s trajectory and incorporates his most recent research. It does not present a synthesis of his artistic career but rather an opening: works reappear in new forms, recent projects converse with earlier ones, and together they trace a cosmotechnics, this is an art of planetary co-agency in which the boundaries between nature, technology, and thought become indistinguishable. Here, fiction is not ornament but method.
Drawing inspiration from science fiction, Andean worldviews, and unofficial histories, Santillán challenges singular narratives and activates fictions not to escape reality but to insist on the coexistence of multiple realities, multiple forms of life, and multiple ways of becoming intimate with matter. What Does It Feel Like to Be Earth offers a space to transform knowledge into something shared, contested, and always in motion. Here, planetary thought intersects with local histories and the more-than-human to propose horizons that overflow the possible and the imaginable.
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