Ruben Santiago was born in Sarria (Lugo), lives and works in Barcelona and Madrid.
His work raises in his practice questions ranging from the analysis of the mechanisms generators of knowledge to the concession of symbolic value, as well as a critical analysis of the schemes of regulation and power, all it by means of installations, site specific projects, online mechanisms, videos, objects and interventions in the public space.
On his first solo exhibition at Llucià Homs Gallery, Ruben Santiago presents Silver Spoon, a specific project that is developed through different techniques and mediums under a strong conceptual bound. This title alludes to the expression "to be born with a silver spoon", phrase that is habitually used as a reference to wealth and, more specifically, to those goods and privileges inherited by birth.
Starting off of an intense formal sobriety, Ruben Santiago raises a critical statement on the historical bases of private property as benefice and right, as they were formulated in the final phase of the feudal era, shaping the axiomatic essence of the systems of work and possession that define contemporary societies.
Silver Spoon continues the line of investigation explored by the artist on previous works, specially relating to his project Pax, which he has been developing during the last years, in a process that begins with the recovery of naturally mummified pigeon corpses in very concrete points on the streets of downtown Barcelona. After the recollection, those organic remains go through an elaborated process of reconstruction and electrolysis, by means of which the mummy receives a metallic copper layer and a final silver coating, in a strategy that alludes to contemporary reflections about sculpture, its relation with space, the passage of time and the social consensus over cession of symbolic value.
As a final stage of Pax project, the corpses, under this new appearance in which the choice of material follows a strong discursive intentionality, once turned into exceptional objects, are restituted to the locations where they were found, creating an open possibility for chance and finding to a hypothetical and unknown public.
In the case of "Silver Spoon", the base material is also formed by mummified pigeon corpses, with the substantial difference of their origin. Thus, instead of being recovered among the fissures of an urban framework, the thirty doves that are shown in the Gallery LLucià Homs come from a single location, the attic of a building where the birds of a near pigeon house moved and installed a new and overpopulated colony.
As a reaction to the undesired appropriation of this space, the owners of the building decided to seal all possible exits from the outside, bordering the thirty doves in a hermetic atmosphere, in which they finally died. Their corpses, mummified by the specific conditions of the place, were recovered by the artist, and went through the metallizing techniques previously described. Therefore, the resulting and attractive silver birds hide in their interior their own organic remains, now safeguarded from the passage of time by an aseptic layer of noble metal.