Santiago Borja
The Gift

Santiago Borja’s artworks exist on the intersection of art, anthropology and architecture, blurring cultural boundaries and contrasting tradition with contemporary theory and design. In 2024 he completed a large sculpture, based on the ruins of Askeaton’s medieval castle and created using peat briquettes, a fossil fuel now phased out in Ireland yet still imported into the country from Eastern Europe. As a comment on societal excess and akin to George Bataille’s theory of the ‘unproductive expenditure’, proposing that art as part of the sacred belongs to a portion of human energy and wealth that cannot be spent usefully, Borja’s sculpture was placed in a yard close to the castle and set on fire during the annual Welcome to the Neighbourhood open day.

Additionally, his video The Gift see him working closely with the Griffin family in the windy Athea-Carrigkerry peatlands. Borja took sods of turf already harvested from the bog and returned them back into the place they came from, creating a reversal of a very typical process of fuel extraction seen in Ireland.

In his extensive 2024 monograph Rather Like A Shadow, curator Catalina Lozano writes about Borja's interactions with spaces that ‘bring with them a certain need to pose questions from unusual corners, to scour their materiality and their style for the place from which they start to wobble, or the nook from which we might be able to generate less normalised narratives about their reason for being – not ones that might bring with them tumbling down, but rather ones that might be able to transform them, discursively and affectively, into spaces of exchange, discussion, mediation, and transformation.’