KOPPEL Collective • Exhibition, 2025

Not a single day goes by untouched by the influence of the chain. The line of raw materials, workers, and vehicles that provide consumer goods. Transfers from bus to train, train to bus on a daily commute. Habits, likenesses, and knowledge inherited over generations. The body, fuelled by the decomposition of molecular structures. These links—some seen, some felt—compose a vast, entangled web that shapes how we live, move, and relate.

In her first UK solo show, Roots and bonds, Argentinian artist Belen Santamarina explores this pervasive entanglement through her sustained engagement with the medium of human hair. Collected over six years from loved ones and strangers, disembodied tresses have made their way from scalp to studio, each strand an archive of accumulated care, labour, migration and time. 

→ Roots and bonds

Book, 2021-Present

Moveable Feast is a community cookbook made by and for East & Southeast Asian diasporic folks in London, quilting together the generational and geographical trajectories of comfort food recipes.

Meditating on the primal resonance of food, the publication returns to commensality- the practice of eating together- as a humble site through which many of us unpack, tear and tuck into notions of love and deprivation, belonging and alienation. Above all, it is an attempt at harnessing the poetics of foodways as a mode of self-preservation, a call to forge communities instead of taxonomies across the East and Southeast Asian diaspora. 

→ Read Moveable Feast here

UK-Mexican Arts Society • Exhibition, 2022

Casa X is a group show of seven Latinx-identifying artists coming together under one roof as 'homemakers' to forge a surreal and sensory vision of 'home'. It envisions 'home' as a fluid site of negotiation, a crossroad of identities where all personal incongruences can unfold and lay to rest. 

Through the interstices between harmony and dissonance, surrealism and mundanity, wholeness and fragmentation, Casa X cultivates a multiply authored story of Latinx diasporic visions of home. Featuring artists from Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela, Casa X aims to disrupt the contrived linearity imposed onto Latinx identities, instead opting to weave together serpentine narratives, sometimes intersecting, sometimes diverging.

→ casaxexhibition.com