Repeat ad infinitum: Belen Santamarina
This curatorial text was published in accompaniment to Belen Santamarina’s solo show Roots and Bonds at Koppel COLLECTIVE.
By Danni Cheng & Issra Marie MartinWhen I first step into Belen’s studio, I am struck by its unexpected orderliness. For an artist whose medium is human hair- those stray strands we recoil from in shower drains or wedged into the crevices of chairs- Belen’s space recalls the precision and care of a Wunderkammer. Not a single strand is lost to the bin or the drain here; she pulls out little Tupperware containers, each containing just a few strands, neatly categorised by colour and texture. There’s a quiet reverence here, a kind of ritual care for what we usually neglect once it’s detached from the body.
Belen tells me her loved ones have been saving their hair for her- Belu bags, as they’ve come to be affectionately known.
Pelito de mamá, little hazelnut tufts of tumbleweed.
Pelito de abuelita, silvers and whites swirl like smoke suspended mid-air.
I make a mental note to begin collecting my own pelitos in a Belu bag; to be entangled in Belen’s processes through prose as well as material. I begin gathering little tufts around my apartment, but before they can rise to boastful heights, I dutifully dispose of these towers. There is a low hum of anxiety in having anyone handle my stragglers with such diligence. Too much human-ness clings to them: sebum, dandruff, split ends, frizz- each a record of neglect or over-attention. I fret she’ll find my strands can stretch to double their length, an elasticity that betrays the many times they’ve been encased in peroxide.
From where does this disgust, this aversion to our own bodies emerge? Is it the state of disembodiment?
Hair does not stick to bathroom tile on its own. Some finessing is needed to temporarily adhere a clump of hair to the shower wall. I know this because I have learned, through the years, to never let my hair go down the drain. So, each wash day, the strands that have fallen away from my scalp are pasted wet onto the walls. At the end of each shower I position my fingertips where the hairs are most densely collected and draw wide circles on the tile to gather them, a dripping clump then dropped into the trash.
I used to forget this step. Sometimes I still think it’s slipped my mind and I’ll rush to the bathroom before anyone else sees the dark tangle and mistakes it for a grotesque habit, a bad prank, an unexplainable domestic sculpture. A complex of shame and duty ensures that I clean up after myself, even though the process is a sensory nightmare. I dislike touching the damp wall, its grainy tile. I dislike how the balled-up hair puffs up at the top of the bin and requires force to keep it down.
Perhaps it is distance from the body that hinders our capacity to self-recognise. Or is it the fear that we are more similar to the things we once thought to be separate from us? Detached from the body, but not entirely distinct. Like bodily detritus and excess, disembodied hair occupies that liminal space between self and Other, from which the abject rears its ugly head.
Belen’s practice unspools these self-concerned spirals of thought and weaves them into collective twine. It has an antigravitational pull, like panning out from the microscopic to the aerial. In Entanglement, a strand of hair constitutes a mere fragment of a singular stitch in a vast continuum of chain stitches, which then come together to forge a 30-metre chain.
It begins like this: one strand entwined with others, spun into thread, then pulled through one interlaced loop to make another loop. Crochet n stitches, repeat ad infinitum. The precondition of a loop is a previous loop.
Here is a constellation of seemingly infinite intimacies, only a few of which are discernible to the naked eye. Somewhere, the glimmer of abuelita’s silvers is refracted through mamá’s cinnamon strands. Elsewhere, it’s an intimacy through unexpected proximity: a childhood friend’s jet-black ringlet twining a stranger’s peroxide plaits. Like a shadow cast by Entanglement’s chain link of relations, Belen’s series of drawings titled Threads literally spells out the stories coded in the hairs. Scripts of real and imagined conversations overlay like a palimpsest of intimacies in graphite.
Belen gives tactility and weight to these intimacies- those known and consensual, as well as those fleeting, inconspicuous, or overwhelming in their vastness. Pan out a bit further; a singular strand from a former lover still clings to a pillowcase. You know how that one got there. And further, millions of strangers’ strands cling to the mesh caps of wigs lining a beauty supply shop’s shelves. That, less so. Disembodied human hair is a potent testimony to these strange and estranged intimacies. Even as we are undeniably connected to one another - by economy, by nation, or by relation - the distance between the first and last link of a chain can still feel infinite.
Later, the gathering process will be repeated, this time peeling away the stragglers that have wrapped themselves around the teeth of my comb. The task is less off-putting, but even so, my muscles tense when a tangle breaks. It’s the feeling of tension running along a strand, stretched beyond its limits. A snapped hair feels like the end of growth, potential, wholeness.
But when I handle Belen’s Carrier Bag, the crocheted hair is surprisingly elastic. The weave is robust with pockets of air that leave it pliable. The flyaways poke my fingers, but as a whole, the bag is soft. It slumps in my hands. I know it can expand and hold; already the hairs that make up the bag are coded with the dormant DNA of former decades and homelands. Belen’s chosen materials are fossils of the outgrown and overgrown. Yes, yes, hair has been long dead by the time it detaches from the head. And yet, hair also survives us, like love.
