No, seriously. We're in love. The guy is just way too sweetheart to be as talented as he is.

Chief Magazine: So what’s your name?

Santiago Mostyn: My name is Santiago.  I live in Brooklyn, New York.

[Laughs] Good, good. And uh, where you from?  Where were you born, grew up, all that kind of stuff?

I grew up in Trinidad, but I lived a bunch of different places.  I was born in San Francisco, left when I was a couple months old. Moved to Grenada, England, Spain, Zimbabwe for six years, then Trinidad when I was nine.

No shit! What was all the bouncing around about?

I grew up with my mother. She’s an artist and teacher, unreformed hippie.

Oh yeah?

Basically [Laughing].

What kind of art does she do?

She did textile design; she still does that.  She lives in Bali.

Sweet.  I guess when was the first time that you felt like you settled down somewhere?  Or maybe you still haven’t done that yet?

Uh, I don’t think I’m ever going to settle. [Both laugh].  Whatever things that I make are made while traveling, or well, they have been. They're not about travel, but they're definitely involved with transience and finding the space between different states of being and trying to describe that.

When did you first find yourself making the kind of work that you consider yourself making now?

You mean photographs?

Well any of it, you know, whether that be photo or video or…

Well I’ve made photographs—I actually got my first camera, when I was twelve or thirteen or so, because my mother made costumes for a carnival band in Trinidad and she bought me this florescent pink point-and-shoot, and she told me to go out into the streets for the two days of carnival and take pictures of them. I would just be by myself, running around.

She set you loose in carnival? [Laughs]

Yeah, she was always setting me loose.

A lot of freedom back then.

I guess so [Laughs].  But yeah so I just went around and took pictures of whatever I wanted and when I found her costumes then I’d take pictures of them, but otherwise I was just wandering around, staring at the chaos.

How did those pictures turn out?

Standard.  They were colorful and pretty.  You know, I have no record of them.  I lose negatives from a year ago, let alone ten years ago. [Laughs].

Fair enough.  

I’m really bad at keeping track.  But, I mostly did a lot of writing when I was growing up.  That was more my direction.  I started getting into photography in a bigger way in university. The first pictures I took were with a large-format camera, and I would spend nights driving around, going out at sunset and then coming back and then going out and staying out until dawn.  So I was always out and driving around at two or three in the morning, around New Haven, all over central Connecticut, sometimes as far as an hour or two out,  just back and fourth.

And you were primarily active at night?

Yeah, I basically took pictures at night with this one, large wooden camera for a year, and nothing else.

Was it like a big light setup or?

No, sometimes I would train the lights of the car I was driving on things, or otherwise it was just ambient light.  Lots of strip malls and parking lots and random strangers.

Also up at three o’clock in the morning?

Yeah, [laughs] a lot of white people are up on drugs at three o’clock in the morning in Connecticut. And that was the first time that I felt like I was—I don’t think I realized it then but—I was just trying to describe a sense of place by doing that, not actually through the images I was making. I was making the photographs just for the sake of making them, because I was so new to the medium and in love with  it. But the actual process of being in a car by myself for, you know, several days of the week for months on end, and working this large machine, that's what I was into.  Also, trying to figure out why I would choose one building over another and, I guess, just enjoying the sensation of being lost, and finding things when I was lost.

What were your days like when you spent your nights doing that?

[Laughs] In class.

Oh ok, so just kind of strictly in that medium?

Well, no, I didn’t go to art school. I went to a liberal arts college, Yale, which just means you end up taking more classes outside of your field than within it. And I wasn't an art major until my junior year anyway. I went there to study environmental law.

Really? I had no fucking idea.

But my roommate took me into the dark room one day and kind of introduced me to the whole thing and I just thought that I would use one of my extra credits and take a photo class.  And at the end of the semester when I told my professor that I thought it was great and that I was really glad that I took this class she just kind of looked at me and said “Wait, you’re taking the second semester right?” as if to say that I would be a fool to not continue.  And then the second class I took was with this guy Tim Davis, who now teaches at Bard. He becames sort of a mentor. He really is a great professor and is good at getting beginners excited about the medium and that was kind of the foundation of, at least aesthetically, that way of working.  

Oh, so you were kind of lucky to have good people around you to kind of influence you in that direction.

Yeah, and then the art school there is good too, so once I got fully into it I had this whole community of people to go back and forth with, to ask technical questions, or to just talk about different ways of working, which was really great.

Yeah, yeah.  So was that your first time spending time in Connecticut?

That was the first time I lived in America, was New Haven, Connecticut, well apart from—

Yeah, a few months as a kid.  So where did you go from there, when that wrapped up?

I went straight to France that summer.  I spent some months with, well six months living in Paris and living in the South of France on this farm commune, way up in the mountains.  To get there you take the train, then the local bus into the mountains to the last stop, and then hitch or walk until the road ends, then hike up this small mountain to the plateau where farm is. And they actually had a closet darkroom there, so I actually made pictures of that community. Then I did a bit more traveling, into Ibiza, where my mother was living at the time, and came to New York at the end of the year.

Page splits here

Is that when I met you?

Yeah, that February maybe.  That’s when I met you and Callie, and Callie was having her first show a few months on from that, that summer, and I started working on that show with her.

I think it’s just easier for me to kind of comprehend where you’re at with kind of like a “through line,” like knowing where the places—I mean like, now I know.

Cool [Laughs].  

So how does all the bouncing around, and all the traveling, where does that put you kind of now that you’re kind of situated, for the first time, maybe ever?

It’s good being situated; it’s not going to be permanent.

Oh I doubt that, yeah.

I’ve found that my instinct is always to unsettle, because that’s what’s happened growing up. I could say I lived ten years in Trinidad, but in thirteen different apartments.  So that's just intrinsic to my character at this point. But I think that it's really healthy for me to go basically half and half with it, letting go of everything, and then coming back to somewhere and regrouping. And right now, it does make sense because I am trying to create things from the process that I go through when I am out in the world and engaging with the tangible. The other half of the time is spent editing and thinking about the things I've made and come across, and then making them legible. Because I don't want to make things that just describe -- how do I put this? I guess, there's a space between the memories I keep with me that are necessarily fictional, and the reality of the spaces that I'm going into, which will be places that I've already lived or been through. Like specific spaces in Zimbabwe, which is just an abstract chaos right now, that I know from childhood. Basically like invading my sweet dreams. [Both Laugh]. Pure evil.

What I’m wondering, when you’re out in the world, do you find yourself able to I guess not just reflect on the work but take stock of the work, or is it just this constant, mad collecting of work and kind of like creation of work?

It’s mostly just collecting; I don’t even get to see what I’m making.  I don’t shoot any photographs for half the year, and then when I do shoot, I shoot countless rolls of film and don’t get to see any of them until I get back to where I can have the space to look at them.

Yeah, and then it’s just got to be an explosion of images and everything.

Yeah, and then it’s a process of looking at the images and digesting them, and I've finally figured out that you can’t do this if you don’t have a wall to put them on. You need to be able to put the pictures up that you like and just be with them for a matter of months or, a year, or however long it takes to know which ones really speak to the thing you want to be saying because pictures read in all sorts of different ways, even if they’re made by one person.  A picture that you’re interested in to begin with may, after a day or a year, not be interesting at all, and one that you dismiss at first, you can look at six months later and realize something completely new.

Well what I’m wondering is, how does that impact your memory?

Well I’m purposefully trying to create a parallel memory track to the ones that I have.  I’m not trying to recreate the experiences that I’ve had—

No, no.  I’m always just concerned with when I have a set memory without looking at the images, and then eventually I’ll take the time to look at the images that came from that time, and those images will replace those moments in my memory as like the specific go to point.  Like the chapter break in the DVD of your head.

Yeah, that’s definitely how it works, I mean photographs are fiction but we treat them as documentary.  We treat them as documents even though there are no photographs which aren't fiction.

Well it’s like everything is fiction though, because like the memory is fiction, you know?  But then it’s like then what do you define as fiction because its like if this is the only thing, if the subjective viewing of it is your legitimate memory but it’s subjective so it’s fiction, but like, the photo is—it’s the same thing, it’s just a different type of memory because it’s also subjective but it is fiction because it’s one direct perspective.

The difference is that one can put that fiction to use, the photographic one.

Yeah.

I mean you can manipulate your memory as well by looking at specific images over and over but you can literally create a certain storyline from scratch with things that you make that don’t necessarily have to relate to the actual passage of events as they took place.

Yeah. Do you uh, just on another level and I don’t know if you already do this with your writing anyways, but do you keep diaries?

I do, it’s on and off.  I don’t write a lot, but I do.  You know, there are people who say that they’re diary keepers and that’s part of their character.  I write when I have to and I usually have to write, but I don’t do it just to self-define.

Maybe not even to share but more curiously

Yeah, no. Not to share, but I definitely have— I wouldn’t call them diaries, more like notes on things that are happening.  And I do that in order to be able to go back.  They’re more like memory markers, in the same way that photographs are memory markers. I’m never necessarily describing things that have taken place.  It's more of my reactions to the things that take place, and then only in abbreviated form. So when I go back and look through the writing and look at the pictures -- because they all become the same thing in the end, the video, the writing and the photographs -- I can build something from them.  So they don’t exist as the final product, but I can take the things that I’ve written and read through them and that will bring me back to an experiential place and I’ll be able to continue on that passage and make something which speaks to what was happening back then.

Yeah, it’s like notes for the photo.

In a way.  The photographs themselves are notes for other things too, though. I found this vertebra.  It’s the size of a softball—

Around or long?

No it’s one vertebra from this fish in the Mississippi River that eats alligators, it’s called the Alligator Gar.  It’s this massive fish!

That’s a big fish!

They fly out of the water when they hear a certain tone of engine and sometimes kill people by knocking them off boats or cracking their skulls [Laughs].

Hm, you’d think they’d be more popular.  Like that I would have heard of them!

[Still laughing]  They got into the river because of the big flood in’93.  They were in some sort of demon fishery, you k

now, as one has—

Oh sure! Fine!

[Laughs again] As one has in that part of the country, and then the river flooded and they got in and populated and became a huge nuisance to alligators.

Like baby alligators or full-grown alligators?

I mean they probably couldn’t handle a full-grown Florida alligator, but it sounds like they specialize in massive reptiles!

Son of a bitch.  So you found a carcass or you just found a singular—

We were always finding bones and pieces of carcasses, and I found this one that I’ve been looking at for fifteen months now, more than a year, and I don’t know what to think of it yet.  I’ve written about it; I look at it almost every day, thinking of its strangeness, and how to present or recreate it.

The entire creature?

No, just the one vertebra. It’s so beautiful.  I've photographed it, I’ve smelled it—it smells kind of bad.