A Conversation with Aissa Santiso

The artist's profile picture for Web3 and social media. NFT from the collaborative series “AVATARS” (2022-23)

Regarding artist Aissa Santiso's participation in the 14th edition of the IN-SONORA Festival in Madrid, featuring her artwork Wallet Garden / Phase 2, our curator, Gabriela Azcuy, conducted a brief interview with her. They discussed this piece as well as several recurring concepts in her practice and research spanning over ten years.

About the artist: Aissa Santiso (Havana, 1992) graduated from the San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts and the Higher Institute of Art (ISA), both in Havana, and holds a master's degree in Artistic Research and Creation from the Complutense University of Madrid.

She is a multimedia artist who has exhibited her work in Spain, Cuba, and the United States. Driven by studies on personal and collective memory, her work investigates and represents everyday situations at the intersection of emerging technologies. Her practice encompasses various disciplines within the visual arts, such as video installation, post-photography, painting, new media, and crypto art. In her most recent line of research, she focuses on post-media studies and disruptive emerging technologies like blockchain, Web3, and NFTs.

WALLET GARDEN / PHASE 2 (2024-26) | Audiovisual Installation

GA: Your research in Wallet Garden / Phase 2 is based on tracking five influential accounts on the Ethereum network to visually expose how recurring agents manipulate crypto markets. When designing the exhibition layout, how do you manage to balance the direct critique of this techno-capitalist world-system with the immersive and fascinating aesthetics of your "electronic landscapes"?

AS: To successfully approach the intersection of these two scenarios, all visual, sound, and spatial elements must be aligned. Ultimately, the piece directly exposes graphs already generated by public-use applications within the network, which I then animate. There is no concealment, as their matrix reveals the entire set of relationships that can emerge from a single node, whether it is a user account, a smart contract, or a collective capital fund.

All the information collected in the Wallet Garden / Phase 2 animations is public; it is audited on the Ethereum network and available from the network's official interface so that anyone can trace it. This traceability is one of the primary milestones of a public blockchain system (alongside decentralization, security, and the immutability of its records). However, the fact that this technology follows anarchist principles and accessibility for all does not mean that companies and capital funds built on the blockchain's infrastructure follow the same network principles. There are numerous examples of DApps and services built on this technology whose sole aim is to generate maximum profitability at the expense of other people's needs on the network, making promises they have no intention of keeping or changing their rules as their interests shift. For example, when large financial institutions move massive amounts of crypto capital on major blockchain networks, great imbalances are created in the market value of cryptocurrencies, directly impacting network fee costs, the prices of many art NFTs, and the economies of regular users. The installation invites the viewer to delve into this complexity, not from a place of fear, but through accessible knowledge.

GA: Your training and career path span from the San Alejandro Academy and ISA in Havana to your current residency and doctoral research in Madrid. You mention that Caribbean and Hispanic American communities have found an alternative space in the blockchain to represent voices that have been displaced. How does your own geographical and cultural transit influence the way you conceive and create these new virtual territories?

AS: In this regard, there are three events that I value highly. The first is having been able to discover this technology and the people who make up the LATAM communities inhabiting these ecosystems. Without the help of these individuals, it would be impossible to critically approach these blockchain ecosystems, as they require transdisciplinary curiosity to search for tools, accessible solutions, and secure knowledge without geopolitical or cultural borders. It is a technology available to everyone, provided they have at least an internet connection and a device capable of connecting to this network.

The second event is having been awarded a predoctoral research contract grant from the Community of Madrid, which is a public call in competition with other researchers from the region. Having this support has favored the development of research on topics related to Hispanic American cultural communities on the blockchain. I consider it a small duty to the communities I inhabit, as these places often go unnoticed within hegemonic European academic ecosystems related to art and technology research. It is also allowing me to develop artistic practices like the one I present with Wallet Garden, which align with my lines of research on the object of study.

The third event is, as you mention, more personal, because it relates to the physical-emotional experience of being a migrant and coming from a country plagued by external censorship policies (coercive economic and political embargoes) and internal ones (coercive policies of totalitarian governments). These policies limit the common subject's integration into the increasingly basic activities of the contemporary Western citizen. Beyond the right to free speech, the right to autonomy over domestic and everyday finances is a type of power typically managed vertically by control policies, often becoming a method of coercion against the emancipatory rights of any citizen. The public blockchain, as a distributed ledger technological system, technically breaks away from the agents that control this type of power, thanks to technical protocols based on asymmetric cryptography, human cooperation and coordination, and server decentralization. It is a technology that facilitates direct self-management between individuals, fostering relationships of trust without intermediaries intervening in those relationships.

For those of us coming from geopolitically excluded, expropriated, censored, and silenced places, participating in this technology does not only mean belonging to an emerging digital economic infrastructure; it means belonging and participating politically and culturally in a technological revolution alike. In other cases, it also represents a self-managed means for domestic subsistence, family remittances, and a place for cultural visibility. This use out of necessity means that in territories lacking European "welfare policies" and in political systems under totalitarian regimes (regardless of political sides), adopting these technologies becomes a political gesture of resilience and local agency, moving far beyond the narratives circulating in the news about financial speculation, cybercrime, and scams.

WALLET GARDEN / PHASE 2 (2024-26) | Audiovisual Installation

GA: In Wallet Garden / Phase 2, you propose the artwork as an "electronic jungle" materialized in an immersive video installation with fabric screens. From a museological perspective, how do you tackle the challenge of translating the immense and abstract volume of data from the Ethereum blockchain into a physical, choreographed experience that the viewer's body can navigate?

AS: From a museological standpoint, one of the recurring interests in several of the video installation proposals I have created in recent years has been to provoke transitability through exhibition spaces enveloped by screens. This methodology is implemented to connect both worlds: cyberspace, visible through the plasma of a digital screen, and the space outside the screens, inhabited by human and non-human bodies. Maintaining a dual separation between both scenarios becomes irrelevant given technological accelerationism, which makes everyday activities and urban infrastructures increasingly codependent on digital technologies and their constant flow of information. Showing a transactional and relational virtual space, as the blockchain often is, through this bodily navigable and affective installation proposal sensorially contributes to this idea of interoperability between spaces that are usually represented separately.

The diagonal arrangement of the fabrics—cutting across the projection space at an angle that falls between the antagonistic vertical and horizontal positions—supports the idea of the electronic garden of crypto wallets, which is the conceptual matrix of the project. These ecosystems are more than just calm, ordered gardens; they resemble tropical forests and jungles with infinite connections that cannot be stopped. And these digital ecosystems, which are drawing human relational cartographies within cyberspace, are already permeating the infrastructures that order the political and social behavior that concerns us in our daily lives, whether we like it or not. Therefore, the museography of Wallet Garden's second phase had to be presented this way to symbolically visualize a type of presence that, until now, has remained hidden.

GA: The sound design of your installation simulates movements across networks, while the graphics expose the smart contracts and real connections of the wallets. By inviting the audience to enter this network, what role do you assign to the public within your installation? Do they function as mere observers or as active nodes to think collectively about these "new cartographies" you propose?

AS: The viewer is given the option to choose what kind of role they wish to exercise afterward, as both the installation proposal and the videos of Wallet Garden only exhibit these scenarios to make their existence visible. The proposal does not aim to force or manipulate a decision from the spectators in situ. Their action is strictly limited to mere contemplation and immersion in the experience that may or may not arise in the exhibition space. The goal is, at the very least, to activate curiosity about these phenomena, which are not isolated and are already happening in their day-to-day lives. The rest will depend on each person's desire to know and their particular interests.

WALLET GARDEN / PHASE 2 (2024-26) | Audiovisual Installation

GA: Throughout your career, in works like BLACK BOX or SCISSORS, you have used tools such as closed-circuit systems, image fragmentation, and text recoding in parallel rooms. What would you say is the visual and/or conceptual common thread connecting those early reflections on surveillance and geolocation with your current immersion in Web3 and NFTs?

AS: For over 10 years, I have been working on research lines related to technological epistemologies, drawing attention to those surveillance and control systems that manifest in urban life through domestic and everyday uses. Several of my artistic proposals show digital technology as both a control system and an emancipation system, sometimes visualizing both simultaneously. For instance, BLACK BOX highlights the presence of voluntary techno-surveillance, where the users themselves provide the material for their own surveillance, simultaneously acting as the unpaid workers of techno-capital. In SCISSORS, control technology is used as a weapon to exert urban resilience through the decoding of encrypted messages.

For my current research focused on blockchain technologies, NFTs, and Web3, both states of technology coexist and are witnessed simultaneously, sometimes without even being contradictory. This condition, which occurs in the simultaneity of apparently antagonistic processes, provides an interesting framework when experiencing a set of aesthetic, sensory, cognitive, and relational connections that occur in artistic practice. It is a technology that invites us to rethink the infrastructures supporting the foundations of the systems that permeate our contemporary urban lives. 

WALLET GARDEN / PHASE 1

About the IN-SONORA Festival: https://in-sonora.org/festival/in-sonora-14/

About the artwork Wallet Garden / Phase 2: https://in-sonora.org/ficha-obra/wallet-garden-fase-2/

More information about the artist Aissa Santiso: https://aissasantiso.com

Images: Courtesy of the artist