Veneno en la Sangre

(Video Installation, 2025)

 

Veneno en la Sangre (Spanish: Poison in the Blood) explores Telenovelas within a futuristic world-building framework. Through the deleted scenes of a Collector's Edition DVD set, the audience is introduced to a disjointed and episodic glimpse into the universe of a fictional homoerotic telenovela entitled Veneno en la Sangre. 

 

Set in the year 2220, in La Siberia - a fictional ghost town in Los Llanos Orientales, Colombia - Ángel and Isaac seek refuge inside a church, the only standing building left. As the scenes evolve, themes of colonialism, capitalism, love, mourning, death, tenderness, and desire are explored. ​

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"Veneno en la Sangre evokes an inherited curse, an inevitable fatal destiny. Through this exhibition, Santiago Tamayo Soler draws on the telenovela, a deeply ingrained phenomenon in the Latin American imaginary, to explore relationships shaped by coloniality, extractivism, and patriarchy from a queer and speculative perspective. Part of a broader world-building practice, here narratives from the margins find space in science fiction, challenging cycles of oppression and loss while imagining alternative futures. 

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The telenovela, as an inherited structure, has conditioned emotional, familial, and gender dynamics for generations. In Tamayo Soler’s work, its traditional archetypes are subverted, with romantic and homoerotic elements introducing new tensions to masculinity, care, and desire. The oft-idealized Latin American landscape is reimagined as a barren, toxic environment. Through a post-apocalyptic lens, the work exposes extractivist economies, where sustenance and death are two sides of the same coin, confronting the question: Is survival possible under these conditions? 

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Like the characters, Ángel and Isaac, lost in a world they once knew, the multimedia installation immerses us in a fragmented telenovela universe, blurring the line between fiction and reality. It reflects on the genre’s economy—fueled by nostalgia, fandom, and the commodification of desire through product placement—while echoing colonial legacies embedded in language, religion, and the landscape. Phantasmagoric elements, drawn from folk tales and Latin American literature, infuse the dystopian world, where a hazy atmosphere, dreams, and visions conjure a haunting sense of loss, embodied by the allusion to "el resto." 

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Despite its speculative character, Veneno en la Sangre remains faithful to the telenovela’s essence—unexpected twists, resourceful storytelling, and complex, epic narratives. Tamayo Soler reclaims the genre, transforming it into a tool for critical reflection and imagination".

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Exhibition Text by Marcela Borquez Schwarzbeck

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Exhibitions:

Centre Clark, Montréal, QC. January 17th - March 1st, 2025.​

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Press:

KUBAPARIS​

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Santiago Tamayo Soler would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts

and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.