PHANTASMATA

Melinda Kiefer Santiago and Christopher Santiago, who collaborate as Phantasmata, are collaborative partners working together since 2018. Together, the couple creates paintings, mixed media installations and performances to invoke a phantom world in defiance to fragmented late capitalism. By utilizing visionary, art brut, and all-over aesthetics alongside found materials and craft practices with eco-surreal imagery, their work critiques Western culture and calls for the re-enchantment of inner and outer nature to imagine alternative cultures of resilience. Assembling heterogeneous materials, they aim to disorient the senses and illustrate the entanglement of nature and culture.

They value community building and organize places for connection such as curated exhibitions, performance events and an interdisciplinary “Art & Consciousness” anthropology journal issue. Christopher is a self-taught artist who teaches Anthropology & Sociology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY as a Doctoral Lecturer, currently finishing a book about his ethnographic work with a transnational mining resistance movement in Cajamarca, Peru through Kaleidoscope, Routledge Press. They currently live and work in NYC and relish time in the woods.