Missing Witches - Witches Found： Art Magic With Marigold Santos

00:00:00.000 The label witch is something that has been created to be a label of fear and a label of oppression. 0.68

00:00:10.280 Hence, with the reclaiming tradition, why it's so important to be a witch.

00:00:13.840 Because it's like saying, this is me, this is what I'm defining to be a witch.

00:00:18.740 My name is Marigold Santos. I'm a visual artist based out of Montreal, Quebec and Calgary, Alberta.

00:00:25.320 I'm a Philippine ex-Canadian woman, and I am also a Libra middle child.

00:00:33.740 And this is what you feel sums you up as a person, a Libra middle child?

00:00:38.300 Yeah, you know what? It does, actually.

00:00:40.440 I feel like being a Libra has been something that's been coming up a lot recently.

00:00:44.960 And it gives me joy, so I'm okay with saying that.

00:00:48.460 So how did you get into astrology?

00:00:49.840 Is that something that's like one of your main forays into witchiness?

00:00:55.820 You know what?

00:00:56.620 It could be definitely an entry point into the witchiness of things.

00:01:00.960 I think that astrology carries a lot of magic around it.

00:01:06.300 And there's a lot of potential.

00:01:08.580 And to me, I feel like magic is really all about potential and the ability to choose, you know, one way or another.

00:01:17.340 And I think there's a lot of power in that.

00:01:19.840 So if I had to say power and magic are very intertwined

00:01:24.520 and choice is really up there as well.

00:01:27.960 I think that your art also deals with the vulnerability,

00:01:33.960 the power of vulnerability as well.

00:01:36.400 There's something in your artist statement,

00:01:38.020 and I'm probably going to misquote it,

00:01:39.900 but I think you said you love precariousness.

00:01:44.720 Now that's something that most people would try to avoid

00:01:48.160 would be precariousness.

00:01:49.260 So can you get into that?

00:01:50.660 Yeah, when I talk about precariousness, I talk about precariousness and identity

00:01:55.180 because I think oftentimes we really try to, and I do it myself too, sum ourselves up.

00:02:01.420 And actually the ambiguity of everything is really a special thing

00:02:06.220 where you don't really have to get caught up in a binary and be one way or another.

00:02:12.220 And actually the spectrum in between is really where all the specialness sort of sits.

00:02:17.300 And so precariousness to me is really this idea about teetering and not very, or like this instability and embracing that flexibility and a lot of that too can be tied into my work where I really celebrate multifariousness and fragmentation and hybridity and all of those things can contribute to this idea of precariousness and identity.

00:02:46.340 And do you think that, I mean, it seems obvious, but I'm going to ask the question anyway.

00:02:50.140 Is that related to your family being a family of immigrants?

00:02:54.240 Yeah, my immigrant background is a really big part of my art and a really big part of my identity.

00:03:03.100 My family had immigrated to Canada from the Philippines in 1988.

00:03:07.000 So I was a young girl. I was seven when we moved to Canada, or I turned seven rather.

00:03:12.860 and for me at the time my main concern as a child was just to integrate as best as I could

00:03:22.420 into Canadian culture and that meant learning how to speak English and learning how to dress like a

00:03:28.960 Canadian kid and understanding this different geography and weather and social landscape that

00:03:37.220 I was not used to. And being a child, you know, your experience of the world is quite limited

00:03:43.180 still, but it's also a very raw and pure way of really experiencing things as well. And so,

00:03:52.300 yeah, it just, it's deeply, it's deeply rooted to that time where I kind of made this,

00:03:59.380 these choices that, um, to sort of adapt and become resilient. And I didn't even really know

00:04:07.480 it until way after the fact. And as an adult reflecting back onto that time in my life

00:04:12.880 and why it features so prominently in my artwork. That was going to be my next question is that how

00:04:19.200 does that, how did those feelings manifest in physical form? Yeah. So, um, reflecting on that

00:04:26.060 time where it was such a pivotal moment where I stopped speaking my mother tongue and adopted

00:04:32.180 English and to this day I don't speak Tagalog anymore but my parents speak to me in Tagalog

00:04:37.460 and I understand it fluently but I just don't speak it and I respond back in English and I think

00:04:42.580 I really think about those moments about being a person that is affected by the multiple homes

00:04:52.160 and the multiple senses of self that you can develop when you're a person of diaspora.

00:04:58.080 And so my work now really deals with this idea of identity and selfhood that is very fragmented,

00:05:05.260 that is very multiple, but that the power in multiplicity is the essence of the work.

00:05:11.500 And again, I talk about the power of choice and the power of multiplicity

00:05:15.660 and gaining strength in those notions, and that's really where the magic lies.

00:05:21.180 You said magic. Can you define magic? Your definition, obviously. We gather perspectives one at a time here.

00:05:28.240 Yeah. For me, magic is a lot of things. It's really not one thing. Magic is potential. Magic is the idea to incite change through choice, and the results of that is also magic in some ways.

00:05:45.080 um magic is imagination and creativity and I think magic is the unknown so it's all those

00:05:52.760 things and more and your art deals with sort of like uh permanence and impermanence you're

00:05:58.320 talking you're speaking about diaspora so how did you get into tattooing which is the most

00:06:04.160 permanent I think art form how did how did you transition from um being a you know a painter

00:06:09.300 sculptor into a tattooer? Yeah I mean for me my work already at heart of it is it's quite

00:06:16.160 interdisciplinary so I will cycle through painting and drawing and sculpture and installation work

00:06:23.440 some performance work animation sound all sorts of things and tattooing was just a natural

00:06:28.620 progression to go there so I don't ever consider myself a tattoo artist I just am still a visual

00:06:33.580 artist that also tattoos. So it's just another way for me to be making marks and for me what I found

00:06:41.140 was that in my studio most people will know my work as very big paintings, really large scale.

00:06:48.160 And we'll post a bunch of visuals on the Instagram and in the show notes for this episode so you can

00:06:53.320 see with your eyes what we're talking about here. Go on. Yeah and so and that's a very intimate thing

00:06:59.200 that I have with my work itself it's very private I'm in the studio and not a lot of people see my

00:07:03.880 process and I kind of keep it that way but tattooing is this other thing where I have a very

00:07:10.000 intimate moment with somebody else and it's a very private intimate moment between me and a person

00:07:14.580 where we have a agreement and kind of like a sacred space together and where we are sharing

00:07:23.000 a moment and that is specifically they've asked me to permanently place one of my images onto

00:07:29.980 their body that they then live with for the rest of their lives and so this is an honor it is and

00:07:36.060 it's an honor for me and it's an honor for each other um oftentimes after tattooing i say to them

00:07:42.400 you know i i really give a big thanks and i say like this tattoo is going to follow you for the

00:07:52.980 every country you visit and it will see every lover you have until the day you die and so thank

00:07:58.240 you for having me be part of your life basically um so it's quite it's quite important to me and

00:08:03.660 it's quite special and I wanted to also include that in my art practice because like I said

00:08:07.860 painting um drawing in the studio is a really um private time for me and so it was um it just

00:08:15.880 opened up my practice to have other individuals in there and you said you kind of prefer that

00:08:21.220 nobody sees your process but can you describe it to us or is even the even the description too

00:08:26.520 private? No the process of making work in the studio or a process oh yeah um it's it's I guess

00:08:32.280 it's private only because to me like my space of a creative agency which is my studio is just a

00:08:38.680 really special space and so it has my energy in there and my energy sometimes is you know tired

00:08:45.400 and lazy and procrastinating and other times it's really hyper focused and I just give I give the

00:08:54.080 credence to that so if if I want to come into my studio and spend three hours mucking about then I

00:09:02.480 will you know and it's sort of like a warm-up and I don't think people really need to see that

00:09:06.740 but then other times when I'm in the flow I'm really in the flow and I don't need to like I

00:09:12.020 would prefer not to be interrupted so then I just um just allow that process to sort of flow out of

00:09:18.260 me and then I can go for a long time do you do any performance art where that that process is um

00:09:24.960 visible um I have done some performances that I can think of off the top of my head um one when I

00:09:32.240 was doing my master's at Concordia I did because I'm also a musician I did this performance where

00:09:38.500 I drew on my skin, I drew a whole bunch of these eyeballs and these marks, and then I

00:09:44.560 picked up my guitar and I sang a song about these ghost children, which were versions of myself as a

00:09:53.040 woman immigrant and sort of having myself be fragmented. And I sang this song and it was a

00:10:00.380 loop and it looped and looped for 20, 25 minutes. I also did another performance where I made a

00:10:07.240 whole bunch of black fingers out of wax and they were cast of my fingers middle fingers a lot and

00:10:15.840 thumbs and they were individual and I stuck them on the gallery walls and then I lit them one by

00:10:23.080 one and then as they were all lit the wax would drip down the white walls and the wax was black

00:10:28.980 because they were coming from these fingers and then afterwards I blew them out and they

00:10:34.440 extinguished them and then the remnants of those black wax finger candles just uh dripped down the

00:10:41.260 gallery walls for the rest of the exhibition they remained in the gallery in that space so

00:10:46.020 there were people there who saw how the drips happened and then there were other people who

00:10:50.600 showed up later and just saw the result yeah and they could just um surmise what had happened

00:10:55.260 super magical yeah that exhibition um was one um in calgary at stride gallery and stride gallery

00:11:04.640 has almost like two rooms that join up to be one and so when i had that exhibition i really wanted

00:11:10.400 to have two distinct exhibitions so two distinct bodies of work but that had a relationship with

00:11:16.620 each other and had a conversation because clearly it's my work so the first side was called coven

00:11:21.280 Ring and Coven Ring really had to do with the work that I had made that drew

00:11:33.380 parallels between witchcraft and boxing boxing like fighting yeah and it's a

00:11:40.700 kind of a strange thing because you know at first glance you don't really can't

00:11:45.400 really tell what there those parallels might be but at the time of at the time

00:11:51.100 of my work I was um starting to really research a lot more about witchcraft and I can tell you a

00:11:57.100 little bit about later why when we talk about Filipino folklore but but to go back I started

00:12:02.820 uh just just researching witchcraft in general yeah there's actually you know the more that we

00:12:07.460 talk Amy there's a lot more that I can I can really tell you about and share but yes so I

00:12:12.020 was researching witchcraft but at this exact same time I had taken up boxing as a recreational sport

00:12:16.660 for myself um just completely unrelated but as i was getting very serious about boxing um i was

00:12:23.960 also starting to research that because naturally that's what you do when you're an artist and i

00:12:29.500 found this essay called on boxing by joyce carol oates oh she's like a feminist author for those

00:12:35.940 of you who haven't heard of her we love her around these parts yeah joyce carol oates look her up 0.60

00:12:40.080 y'all and the thing that people don't know about joyce carol oates was that she's actually a

00:12:43.700 boxing aficionado because her father used to take her to these boxing matches when she was a kid

00:12:48.340 so she's very well versed in in boxing and she wrote this really amazing essay about boxing called

00:12:53.920 on boxing and what i found really important in that essay was how she was talking about in the

00:12:59.700 ring which is a magic circle which is a circle that has these boundaries between spectator

00:13:05.720 and the sport um how there is uh ritualistic tendencies there's an agreement between who's

00:13:13.000 watching and who's in the ring um but she also just talks about how your opponent is your

00:13:18.720 mirror other and how when you're essentially fighting your opponent you're fighting this

00:13:25.520 other version of yourself and i've i found that quite important especially because my work really

00:13:30.120 deals with multiplicity but in a consensual way when you're in that boxing ring it's not like

00:13:34.220 you're just going and beating on someone like there's consent is is highly practiced in the

00:13:38.680 ring yeah it's an agreement you know it's an agreement between you and your opponent and

00:13:42.380 then your opponent is your mirror self so um whatever moves you make and whatever gains you

00:13:48.980 make and losses it's really this dialogue between you and yourself in some ways so I found that

00:13:54.100 really important and really applicable to my work um and also boxing is really interesting and weird

00:13:59.640 there's like you know there's a lot of um regalia that you wear you know you you come into the ring

00:14:05.340 with these robes and the trumpetist soundtrack of victory behind you yeah yeah and so a lot of um

00:14:12.640 there's a lot of you know there's um these hanging uh heavy bags that become surrogates for the body

00:14:20.160 that you punch and they're they swing and you know like and they're they're hung from the ceiling and

00:14:26.120 you know it's kind of macabre and it reminds us of you know persecution and sort of like the dark

00:14:30.740 history of witchcraft but um there is there was a lot of things that I was just quite interested in

00:14:36.920 you know this idea of even like footwork you know and dancing I'm gonna interrupt for two seconds to

00:14:44.060 ask if you remember Milford Kemp who was the Jimi Hendrix of Montreal do you remember that guy he

00:14:50.120 would be up on the mountain on Sundays with like a little and he dressed like Jimi Hendrix like

00:14:55.820 big hat with a feather and he i started talking to him because i love a weirdo like i'm like you

00:15:01.940 what's your story yeah exactly i feel comfortable with you um most people would have just been

00:15:07.780 terrified of him because he was quite a character you know but i started i gave him a tip you know

00:15:13.800 he's a he's busking and he said oh here's my dvd great and he was also he was a dancer and a boxer

00:15:20.720 and I thought of him because of what you just said

00:15:22.740 like he would map out

00:15:25.600 like almost like a choreography in the ring

00:15:27.780 and then he would draw it

00:15:29.540 and so he made these like pieces of visual art

00:15:32.440 that looked like, I don't, fractal, geometric

00:15:35.180 but it was like a dance that he had drawn inside the ring

00:15:38.500 so yeah, boxing and witchcraft

00:15:40.240 like we never would have thought of it

00:15:42.300 but here we are

00:15:43.080 exactly, you never would have thought it

00:15:45.980 and I didn't either

00:15:46.960 and it was really like that essay that I read

00:15:49.860 that really introduced and also I was in the ring and I was punching and sweating and considering my

00:15:56.160 footwork and really like conscious of my body in a different way you know so that that body of work

00:16:02.880 yielded a lot of imagery of individuals or figures that were covered in robes and those robes were

00:16:10.180 painted with various different patterns and magic hour sunsets and white witch moths all sorts of

00:16:18.780 things that really like kind of integrated both together and i made this really big heavy bag

00:16:23.280 that was um painted very realistically and then surrounded by gold as though it was some sort of

00:16:29.700 like sacred object um which to you it was which it really was yeah and it's a body you know it's

00:16:35.720 a surrogate of a body um and so going back to this show at stride coven ring i was on the one side

00:16:42.060 and on the other side was this other show that i had called invisible mother and invisible mother

00:16:48.180 also really deals a lot with witchcraft.

00:16:51.000 And really the essence of that show

00:16:53.540 was tapping into this idea of the mother figure

00:16:57.460 and how the mother figure becomes foundations

00:17:00.160 for a lot of thought and a lot of lessons in life,

00:17:06.560 but that through our learning, 1.00

00:17:09.780 a lot of women have been persecuted

00:17:11.400 and through their loss have we really learned and gained.

00:17:16.340 So it was a lot of honoring of that.

00:17:18.180 And that's where those witch, or those, well, they were witch fingers, and those black candle fingers really was a sort of shrine that were lit in honor of, you know, fallen women over time.

00:17:30.560 And you can really take that as you will for, you know, just, you know, women's efforts along history in general.

00:17:38.980 But specifically in my work, in that particular body of work, it was really informed by many things.

00:17:45.020 One of the things was the story of the Hand of Glory.

00:17:50.200 Do you know the Hand of Glory?

00:17:51.520 I don't.

00:17:53.100 And I'm going to assume that some of our listeners don't either,

00:17:55.500 so you're going to tell us.

00:17:56.460 And I had just discovered the Hand of Glory

00:17:59.140 while I was doing research on the mandrake plant.

00:18:05.100 I'm sorry, why?

00:18:06.420 Why were you researching that?

00:18:07.700 Because you're an artist and you research random things.

00:18:10.160 Yeah, I just research random things.

00:18:11.560 the mandrake plant just to just to tap into what you're saying there was interesting to me because

00:18:17.160 it was it is a plant that um the bottom half of it which would be underground um in the ground

00:18:23.740 the root systems look like a body they look like a female body for the most part and then the upper

00:18:29.260 part that's above ground are like the leaves um and the mandrake plant has been used for various

00:18:35.020 things over time but uh i was interested in that because there's a particular character in

00:18:40.040 filipino folklore which we will get to and so that really reminded me of the mandrake plant but

00:18:45.380 back to the hand of glory there was in my research i discovered this this thing this object called

00:18:54.020 the hand of glory and what it was apparently there is only one that exists in the world and

00:19:00.160 it's preserved and in some sort of museum in britain somewhere usually that's where all the

00:19:07.120 artifacts end up in our Western museums. Exactly, and apparently this hand is

00:19:13.660 supposed to be the severed hand of a hanged man, who is a criminal, because

00:19:19.220 that's why they had hanged him, supposedly, allegedly, and let's see if I

00:19:24.760 get this right. This severed hand then gets pickled in the rendered fat of that

00:19:31.000 man, and then what happens is this hand becomes a magical object where you can

00:19:36.360 light the fingers and the fingers um then so then the another criminal supposedly can then

00:19:44.340 hold this hand if you get a hold of it a hold of this hand and you can light the fingers and i

00:19:52.340 think once you do you can place a hex on people who are asleep in a house and apparently if you

00:19:58.100 like light the fingers and one of them doesn't light it sort of indicates that somebody else

00:20:02.520 is still awake in the house and the only way to extinguish this hand is through dousing it with

00:20:08.460 milk and particularly breast milk so so just really interesting fascinating things and then

00:20:14.460 through my research I found this thing that said well the very first hand of glory was

00:20:19.560 was supposedly from the severed hand of one of the first witches that was persecuted

00:20:26.680 you know so i thought like you know that that was just incredibly fascinating to think that

00:20:33.580 of course like this very powerful object tool could summon up all this magic and of course

00:20:40.280 it's going to come from a woman um and so then that really started a big bunch of work of

00:20:47.940 dealing with wax and fats and dripping and transition and magic and again fragmentations

00:20:55.620 if we're talking about dismemberment and severing um but yeah that work was really quite interesting

00:21:02.680 and so the other thing too to get back to this whole mandrake business was that the hand of

00:21:09.980 glory was a man de gloire which something is like man de gore and it was like a bastardization of

00:21:17.560 like a man de gore mandrake there was something there was some sort of relationship there i can't

00:21:23.280 really remember off the top of my head every single detail i am just an artist that does

00:21:26.760 some research here and there yeah and again here at missing witches we are not looking for anybody

00:21:31.420 to be the expert on anything other than their own perspective yeah so we're gathering perspectives

00:21:36.260 one at a time amazing so how heavily ritualized is your process it sounds like i mean a lot goes

00:21:44.040 into every piece I would say that I do have my own various rituals for my

00:21:51.720 creative process everything from how I start my day and putting on my specific

00:21:58.020 uniform which is usually like a boiler suit that's covered in paint and

00:22:02.520 splotches and lots of artistic things sort of bits and splotches yeah all of

00:22:09.120 your works leading up to that point exactly and right now I'm also wearing a

00:22:12.560 boiler suit. If you don't know what a boiler suit is, it's like coveralls. It's like a

00:22:16.600 garage coveralls or like a military, like a full one-piece. Exactly, coveralls. And

00:22:21.680 I have many, because I just like to collect, because I'm an artist.

00:22:26.680 They're really comfortable. Yes, exactly. But this one is my presentable one. So I'm

00:22:33.880 wearing this for you, Amy. But the one in my studio is very, it's covered and it's crusty

00:22:38.000 and I love it and it's comfortable and um yeah and you know that kind of thing factors into my

00:22:45.060 ritualistic parts of making my work um all the way down to also listening to very specific things

00:22:50.760 um I listen to a lot of music a lot of podcasts a lot of audio books while I'm while I'm making

00:22:56.680 but whenever I'm painting or drawing and I have to make decisions then I turn all the music off

00:23:02.900 and I have to be it has to be very quiet and I have to make interesting yeah I have to make like

00:23:07.180 really important decisions without any kind of um distraction or yeah that sort of thing um also

00:23:14.860 you know constant snacking i'm always constantly snacking on chips

00:23:20.840 and uh you know just little snacks because i just love snacks and um you can also just see this

00:23:29.900 tattoo across my fingers there uh across my knuckles it says or my what would you call these

00:23:36.820 like middle knuckles yeah middle knuckles um it says merienda which is a tagalog word

00:23:42.880 for um which is my mother tongue and it says snack and people see this and they go oh is that

00:23:48.720 your grandmother's name and sometimes i just go yeah because i don't really want to snack

00:23:54.660 it basically means snack or two snacks so um i was actually a little bit distracted earlier by

00:24:01.900 this piece i'm pointing at another hand tattoo that marigold has um it looks kind of like um

00:24:07.380 a honeycomb um but like a little more scientific and a little more representational do you want to

00:24:14.020 describe it yeah this is actually um a hand poke tattoo that i received from julie on instagram

00:24:21.280 she goes by the people's inc and she calls herself a bruja which is a witch she's a

00:24:27.540 filipinex healer and she specifically tattoos filipino tribal tattoos that have been influenced

00:24:35.640 by various different tribes in the philippines and she tattoos them on poc bodies so i was honored

00:24:42.520 to have her tattoo my hand my right hand which is my dominant hand and my working hand and i'd

00:24:48.920 asked her to give me a talisman that honored my ancestors so we had come up with this image

00:24:56.100 together and the pattern that looks like honeycomb is actually snakeskin we see lots of repeating

00:25:03.560 patterns in nature definitely so snakeskin there's um centipede legs these are um ferns that are

00:25:11.400 five pointed um to represent like the family members that i have and this really back part

00:25:18.120 here is sort of the back end of a boat it's a boat that uh you travel into the afterlife

00:25:24.100 and then there's a little star here which is the star from my mother's province big uh respect to

00:25:30.640 her is um she really comes up with a lot of the designs together with with her clients and um it's

00:25:36.700 a really beautiful ritual when you go and get a tattoo from her so it's a it's a ceremony from

00:25:42.780 beginning to end where you say prayers and you bring offerings to your ancestors and then she

00:25:49.180 does the poking technique and then um you sort of do uh sort of a thank you and gratitude afterwards

00:25:56.620 and yeah it's a really beautiful thing and i highly recommend everyone looking her up because

00:26:00.540 she's can you say the name again yeah so her instagram name is or her instagram handle is

00:26:06.300 the people's inc the people's inc and we'll link you to that in the show notes for sure

00:26:10.820 so um being filipino is a really big part of my work and all of the folklore and all of the magic

00:26:17.880 and all of the supernatural that I'm very much interested in

00:26:22.480 is all deeply rooted in my heritage.

00:26:24.220 And so there is, when I started doing my master's degree in Montreal,

00:26:30.500 I was already starting to begin thinking about this idea of fragmentation

00:26:34.980 and multiplicity through my personal experience as being an immigrant

00:26:39.620 and our immigration as my departure point from my work.

00:26:44.860 and at that time I was thinking about the things that you take with you and the things that you

00:26:50.640 leave behind when you're moving around and that could be as big as moving country to country but

00:26:55.260 it can be city to city or even neighborhood to neighborhood or even homes to home or even room

00:27:00.280 to room and how you sort of leave traces of you behind so I was really interested in this idea of

00:27:05.140 like attachment detachment and and the leaving and the traces and at this at the time I thought

00:27:13.860 well you know as a child what do I bring with me because I don't really have much to bring with me

00:27:18.400 I'm really young and my experience of life is so small but I do recall the stories and the

00:27:24.600 narratives that were told to me so I brought those with me those were the things that I brought to

00:27:28.380 Canada and I have this aunt who I love very much and her name is Roslyn and she would be the one

00:27:35.720 to tell me all of the folklore and you know as a kid I really wasn't interested in you know fairy

00:27:43.440 tales and sort of pleasantries I was really drawn to like the more grotesque and dark parts of the

00:27:50.380 folklore and specifically there is this one character called an Aswang. An Aswang. An Aswang.

00:27:56.120 It's spelled in various ways it can be A-S-U-A-N-G or A-S-W-A-N-G and the story of the Aswang as a

00:28:05.560 character can really differ from region to region or from who's telling the story and so as we know

00:28:10.940 about folklore that's usually how they mutate and change and evolve over time which is a beautiful

00:28:15.300 thing about oral traditions so with the aswang the way that i understood it a specific one

00:28:22.160 um is called a mananangal that's a little bit harder to spell mananangal translates to um 0.93

00:28:30.180 to separate or to remove um but so this specific one is usually a woman

00:28:38.320 usually with long black hair, can be somebody in your neighborhood, 0.98

00:28:42.460 can be somebody that is a neighbor, looks like a regular human in the day,

00:28:49.560 but at night has the ability to self-sever.

00:28:52.820 So the ability to divide at their waist, and they have to discard their lower half

00:28:58.420 and hide it somewhere in the night while their upper half flies away and hunts

00:29:04.720 and does some pretty gruesome things like eating viscera and eating babies

00:29:09.700 and these very scary, gross, macabre things.

00:29:14.540 And then at the end of the night, the upper half has to rejoin their lower half,

00:29:18.340 otherwise they die fragmented.

00:29:19.720 So this idea of attachment-detachment was a really important thing for this character's survival.

00:29:25.100 I usually just say she's a hybrid between a witch and a vampire 0.90

00:29:28.180 in that she's sort of this viscera sucker, and she eats the viscera. 1.00

00:29:34.720 But she's also a witch because she sort of operates on the outskirts.

00:29:41.080 And so immediately that character started to become

00:29:45.900 and inform everything about my artwork going forward.

00:29:49.500 So even if you look at my works now,

00:29:51.260 and if you look at the works at Coven Ring

00:29:52.860 or anything that I make or draw,

00:29:56.480 the Aswang character is embodied in all of them.

00:29:59.760 So you might see characters that have multiple limbs that might be severed, disjointed.

00:30:07.740 You might see a figure that's covered in like a shroud.

00:30:11.400 All of those versions are all my reconfigured versions of what an Aswang is to talk about

00:30:18.020 this idea of multiplicity and strength and empowerment through personal experience.

00:30:25.240 and so another thing too is if you see the aswangs the kind of most newest iteration of it would be

00:30:31.700 the ones that are shrouded and they have what look like some sort of garment that kind of covers them

00:30:37.160 that looks like it's blotchy with ink and basically what that quote garment is is really a skin it's

00:30:45.980 not really a fabric and they're not really hiding behind a fabric they're actually revealing

00:30:49.740 themselves through the fabric and the fabric is a skin that's covered in blotches that are meant

00:30:54.780 to represent ink and blood and dirt and rot and the cosmos and all of those things really speak

00:31:02.580 about experience and the way that you apply ink is a very it's very hard to control ink but you

00:31:10.280 can to an extent but then you also have to give in to its fluidity and so every time I make those

00:31:14.520 drawings or paintings or tattoos they all are very different and those aswangs show their experience 1.00

00:31:21.920 through their skin so it's not so much about um concealing it's really about really revealing 1.00

00:31:26.380 through choice so you've sort of taken this iconography of like a monster creature and

00:31:34.320 and used it as a symbol of empowerment yeah and i think that is like witchcraft at its core

00:31:41.960 and i'll tell you another thing too so there's this really amazing paper that was written by

00:31:47.260 Herminia Quimpo-Manez and it's about I think it's called the Aswang mythology and the politics of

00:31:54.200 gender. I might actually have messed that title up but it's something like that anyway so it's

00:32:01.060 Herminia Quimpo-Manez and in this essay she argues that the Aswang actually comes after

00:32:09.500 colonization. So the Philippines was colonized for 300 years by the Spanish and so before

00:32:16.440 they were colonized they were people that were quite egalitarian and they had healers and shamans

00:32:24.120 called babaylan yes and for those of you who are listening right now tune in next sunday for our

00:32:28.980 episode about urduja a very famous and wonderful babaylan amazing so babaylan um and so what they

00:32:36.280 say actually in what she argues in this in this paper is that during um the colonization and

00:32:43.560 during the missionizing of the people they had to take pre-existing belief systems and invert them

00:32:50.180 in order to catholicize and so these shamans who were in charge of midwifery and healing and

00:32:59.020 spiritual practices that were all life-giving were then demonized and villainized to become

00:33:04.040 life-taking and so she argues in her paper that even this idea of severing from your lower half

00:33:10.700 means that you're severing away from your reproductive organs

00:33:13.860 and you're starting to represent sort of the opposite side of life-giving.

00:33:20.620 And this colonial fragmentation.

00:33:23.440 Exactly. 0.93

00:33:24.160 Yeah, and so she really becomes this malicious, malevolent creature.

00:33:30.160 And we saw this with Medusa too, right?

00:33:32.360 Yes, with Medusa.

00:33:34.200 For those of you who don't know the backstory behind the head of snakes, 0.92

00:33:38.060 Medusa was a rape victim.

00:33:39.140 yeah she was a she was a victim of abuse and yeah medisa is a really powerful figure and i actually

00:33:46.480 do a lot of tattoos of medisa heads because she's quite important and and i mean a lot of us can 0.98

00:33:51.060 relate to this like oh you're an angry insert whatever you are here an angry woman an angry

00:33:55.960 this and angry that and completely discounting the steps that angered us yeah there's a process

00:34:02.540 of that anger and that anger is an important thing it's an important protest how does witchcraft

00:34:08.040 manifest in like your regular day life yeah i guess you know it's really interesting because

00:34:12.480 i don't i haven't really like looked at it through that that lens where i go well what

00:34:17.580 what are the things i do but you know talking to you more and more i do have a lot of rituals that

00:34:22.900 i i do that are quite witchy and i think it's important to think about witchcraft as something

00:34:29.300 that's very open-ended you know and i think that's what's important and if there's anything

00:34:34.200 that i want to convey is that maybe my witchcraft is the fact that i am very open um i think that

00:34:41.160 you know to be open and to allow a porousness to happen between you and your experiences the

00:34:48.280 people you meet the way that you see a situation the way you start your day i think that's really

00:34:54.180 important and i think that's maybe the best way to describe what my witchcraft is

00:34:58.840 um but that said i also do some very specific things every day that i don't know if you can

00:35:09.000 necessarily call this witchcraft but i just have those everybody has their rituals or morning

00:35:14.100 rituals their specific way they take their coffee their specific way i have to have my red rose

00:35:19.480 first thing in the morning you're talking about the tea not the flower oh yes yes

00:35:26.180 I don't say it has to come into the room with a single red rose every morning no we're talking

00:35:31.600 about a cup of tea don't get so bougie oh yeah yeah just like cup of tea and it's the most un-bougie

00:35:36.420 I do love my red rose and I do love a single egg in the morning it's this thing where um you know

00:35:46.040 if anything when we talk about bodies it's the thing that I really feel like as soon as I ingest

00:35:51.540 it, I feel awake and I feel conscious of my body. Oftentimes when I do wake up in the morning and

00:36:01.640 before I go to bed, I do just say a thanks to the universe. I do that because I have a lot of things

00:36:09.360 to be grateful for and I definitely, I'm aware of my privilege and that's something that I carry

00:36:14.380 with me and I have gratitude for to make sure that I'm conscious and always conscious of what

00:36:21.200 it is that the gifts that I have and also um yeah my place and how to share it yeah I think

00:36:28.480 gratitude is definitely one of the witchiest things out there just like um because of all

00:36:33.940 the things that we take for granted like yeah that breath that I just took that air was just

00:36:39.080 sitting there ready and waiting for we don't thank the air witches do yeah it's true you're

00:36:45.080 absolutely right yeah thank you Amy thank you air you know thank you air thank you air yeah

00:36:52.920 I definitely thank my body a lot for getting me to and from that is something I do and also when

00:36:59.140 I was boxing I don't competitively box anymore but there was a time that I did and that was

00:37:04.920 it was a really time-consuming moment in my life and it was the kind of thing where I couldn't

00:37:11.380 really have anything else outside of it because it occupied so much of my brain space and so much

00:37:17.000 of my body and you know you had to be very conscious of what you ate and how you exercised

00:37:23.260 and how you spent your free time and it really didn't leave a ton of space for other things and

00:37:27.660 so I really gave that my all and I it answered a lot of questions that I had at the time but those

00:37:33.380 questions are answered now and I don't really need to go there plus I really am so protective of my

00:37:37.940 head now more than ever like your physical my physical head because you know when I was boxing

00:37:42.660 it was it was very violent to my head and you know to my body and but but the head and we think

00:37:49.100 about brain trauma a lot these days and that's something that I'm just so grateful that I didn't

00:37:53.980 really do a lot of damage but anyway it was a really powerful moment in my life I don't think

00:37:58.260 I can recreate it and I'm so happy to leave it where where it is um and what it's done for me

00:38:04.320 So when I think back, I have a lot of gratitude for the strength that I gained during that time.

00:38:08.840 And that's another great thing about being a witch is that you accept that change is good, that the moon has phases, and so do we.

00:38:14.760 You're not like, well, I'm a professional, you know, competitive boxer, and that's what I am now, and I'm going to, like, die on this hill. 0.51

00:38:23.360 Like, you're allowed to stop asking the question when you get the answer.

00:38:27.000 You're allowed to.

00:38:27.760 What's that quote?

00:38:28.720 You're under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.

00:38:32.260 Yeah. It's, again, remember, like, my magic and my witchcraft is the power of choice. So you can choose and do whatever you want.

00:38:41.900 Let's get into that more, because a lot of your early life, you had no choice. So do you think that your focus on this idea of choice is a reaction to that?

00:38:52.100 or? I mean, that's a really good question. I don't really think that my inability to choose

00:39:00.160 because I was a child really affected me. If anything, I really honored that time because

00:39:04.220 I honor the fact that my parents made an incredible choice, which was to leave the

00:39:08.860 Philippines and to come to Canada for a life for their kids. So there's three of us. I have an

00:39:13.500 older brother and a younger sister. The Libra middle child. Libra middle child. I love my 1.00

00:39:18.620 siblings very much. And so, um, yeah, if anything, I really think back to those moments and think

00:39:24.920 about how powerful that was for them to leave their families behind and come to a country that

00:39:30.360 they didn't know anybody in, um, and weren't strong in the language and, you know, it's a

00:39:35.260 completely different landscape, social landscape, geographical landscape, um, and to make a life

00:39:41.300 for themselves. And so if anything, I just, I'm able to do and think and feel the way that I can

00:39:50.160 because of them. So it's not even really as much of a rebellion, even though sometimes I do think

00:39:55.880 a lot that there was a lot of pushback. You know, as a kid, I went to church a lot. Like I went to

00:40:03.540 I was raised Christian and Roman Catholic,

00:40:08.000 so obviously I don't go to church anymore and I haven't.

00:40:13.060 And I feel like that was a very conscious choice

00:40:15.900 and that was like a choice to really disavow that

00:40:19.600 and be a free thinker.

00:40:22.200 And I think that's really, again, the power is being a free thinker.

00:40:27.040 Would you say that it's not Catholicism that you rejected so much

00:40:30.060 as dogma in general?

00:40:31.480 Yeah, yeah, just the dogma.

00:40:33.540 but you know i think like this is really funny because it's not exactly the same thing but sort

00:40:40.620 of but i think like even like growing up i was just really skeptical of male figures to be

00:40:47.100 perfectly honest i really was like i hated and to this day still do santa claus oh my goodness

00:40:54.660 give us your perspective on santa claus oh my gosh who is this old white guy who's supposed

00:41:00.180 to tell us if we were good or bad and then withhold gifts dare you judge how dare you judge

00:41:06.000 me I remember my mom she would you know put these Christmas gifts out and then she would sign like

00:41:11.400 to Goldie love Santa and I would I would glare at her because I would be like do you think that I'm

00:41:17.640 so dumb as to think that you that there's a true Santa like mom this is your writing come on I was

00:41:24.000 like nine but i tread lightly on that because i don't want to ruin that for other people who have 0.99

00:41:30.840 kids well that's the thing you know one of my one of my girlfriends has a son who's like 10 now and

00:41:36.400 so he you know and she's like a very honest and very like um atheist person not that those two

00:41:43.580 things necessarily always go together but for her she's like very direct very atheistic but she's

00:41:48.620 like i'm not gonna tell my kid this so he can go to school and like ruin christmas for everyone

00:41:54.280 else exactly i like i find santa claus very problematic too um some of our listeners probably

00:41:59.560 know this already but the idea of a kid thinking that they weren't good enough yeah like that okay

00:42:04.940 your mom is like struggling at her minimum wage job and she can't figure out how to get a christmas

00:42:09.160 present for you and you're thinking as a little child well i was bad so santa didn't bring me

00:42:14.520 anything this year like it's so problematic on so many levels thank you amy yeah but this is like

00:42:20.840 your your white male old man authority christmas of the christmas authority figure so that was like

00:42:26.760 your first taste of like yeah this patriarchy business is not working for me yeah and i also

00:42:32.380 just didn't appreciate this you know um hoopla the mall where you'd have to line up and sit on

00:42:38.100 his lap come on yeah come on like i don't need to say anymore yeah patriarchy has this weird way

00:42:46.280 of normalizing really like really weird stuff yeah exactly but also i hope that uh for those

00:42:56.720 people who uh i'm related to sorry because they got kids they got kids and i don't want that i

00:43:04.420 want it ruined for them yeah but maybe like as a society we could like sort of change that thinking

00:43:10.260 I mean that's what I would like I mean for me to have a little voice in that is as much as I can do

00:43:14.520 you know so let's just say I mean we're a long way away from Christmas right now so you'll have

00:43:18.880 plenty of time to prepare so maybe start laying this groundwork if you have young children like

00:43:23.760 maybe it's not healthy for like a being to be watching you and judging you and then if we can

00:43:30.920 extend that into our dogmatic notion of God, then we can get some world changing going on.

00:43:36.060 There you go. There you go. So you are so multimedia. Can you get into like, I know

00:43:45.500 you said you're a musician, but you've also done like sound art. Basically you're like dealing with

00:43:50.960 all of the senses. Yeah. So get into that, please. I feel like that just again has to do with my

00:43:58.160 idea of being open I think just like as an artist I have my favorites of how to make my images and

00:44:06.320 how to make sensations but I don't really want to rely on just one right and so that's why I've got

00:44:13.640 the tattooing for me that really taps into this idea of intimacy with another person and it's very

00:44:20.300 small a tattoo even though the tattoos I give are you know proportionally big because they take up

00:44:25.960 space on a body to me that they're quite small images still because you were talking before

00:44:30.340 usually your art is quite large scale so a human body doesn't even have enough skin space for you

00:44:35.560 to do that kind of large scale yeah exactly and it's also really nice because they're you know

00:44:40.720 they're I can finish them in one sitting and you know a few hours or maybe even a couple sittings

00:44:45.900 but regardless they're not like these paintings that take weeks and weeks and weeks to complete

00:44:50.080 so that for me is pleasurable

00:44:53.180 and there's joy in that

00:44:54.840 in the various ways of making work

00:44:57.400 I suppose

00:44:58.080 working with sound

00:45:00.460 is something that's been interesting to me

00:45:03.320 because I learned how to play guitar

00:45:05.700 when I was younger

00:45:06.380 and singing is something that's part of my family

00:45:09.340 my dad's a really good singer

00:45:10.460 and I just really like singing and having a voice

00:45:13.880 also I'm Filipino so we karaoke all the time

00:45:15.840 so just like part of it

00:45:17.440 but yeah so kind of incorporating music sound and that sort of texture into my work was

00:45:26.460 was really interesting and recently I have an exhibition opening where I collaborated with

00:45:32.380 a musician Mahmoud Hussain and I recorded a poem that I wrote about this burning woman

00:45:42.160 that was made out of gold and how her ashes kind of go into the air

00:45:48.440 and they settle and they become the dust that we take into as charcoal

00:45:55.720 and we make markings on our skin.

00:45:58.280 And then I say that in Tagalog, which is my mother tongue,

00:46:01.200 that I don't speak fluently, but then I record myself sort of repeating this poem

00:46:07.200 and then Mahmoud went and he sort of digitized it

00:46:13.100 and he's an electronic musician,

00:46:14.980 so he made a composition and a soundscape.

00:46:17.480 And that is going to be like the soundtrack to this film

00:46:20.780 that I recorded of an actual sculpture of a gold woman that I made

00:46:25.960 that is made out of gold and plaster

00:46:29.180 and she's laying on a pyre, basically, of stones 0.94

00:46:34.800 and then I set her on fire. 0.82

00:46:36.480 and she she's on fire and she smokes and then parts of her body disintegrate one at a time so

00:46:43.860 her leg falls off and then her head rolls down and then her other and then what's left is this

00:46:49.120 golden hand on top of the pyre and it's it's really beautiful imagery that i could never have

00:46:54.680 planned um what was the um the hand that we were talking about before the hand of glory the hand

00:46:59.400 of glory the sacred hand no that's not it so you're left with this alternate hand of glory

00:47:04.720 Yeah, yeah, in some ways. It's really quite fascinating. I mean, hands have been a really big part of my visual imagery. So if you kind of go back and you look at all of my work, a lot of, it just, it celebrates the hand in so many ways.

00:47:18.660 So there's lots of severed hands, a lot of blackened hands,

00:47:22.320 and a lot of hands that are ornate and decorated.

00:47:25.840 And, yeah, so hands are quite important to me.

00:47:28.260 So I could not have planned that,

00:47:29.620 and that was an unintentional thing that happened,

00:47:32.280 and it just was the universe.

00:47:34.740 Oh, don't you just feel like that's like a gift from the gods

00:47:38.380 when you're just, like, experimenting,

00:47:40.220 and then the experiment is, like, so much more successful than you could ever.

00:47:45.200 And, again, that feels to me when I'm in that process of creating,

00:47:48.200 when it really pays off like that it's it's like spell work producing fruit you know yeah that's

00:47:53.820 what it feels like to me yeah yeah and in that situation where you know we set this woman on fire

00:47:58.180 there's just no way to ever know how that's gonna go you know you're working with flame and smoke

00:48:03.620 and wind yeah and so how do you know how that's gonna burn off you don't and that's the most

00:48:10.580 exciting part yeah yeah so hopefully you'll get to see this show amy you're doing a show here in

00:48:16.680 montreal which is opening it opens march 23rd and it runs until april the 20th okay so you guys will

00:48:23.740 hear this and have plenty of time where is it it's just in case our montreal listeners actually yeah

00:48:28.240 it's at the may and that's the montreal arts intercultural museum and what neighborhood is

00:48:33.860 that um it's enjambance so i feel like it might be considered plateau still or maybe it's on its

00:48:40.840 way to being downtown the MAI on the plateau please go and check out this exhibition and can

00:48:46.780 you tell some of our listeners who are like maybe I'll go down to this what can they expect to find

00:48:50.200 so that exhibition is called Malaginto which means golden and that exhibition features all

00:48:56.780 of my new ceramic works that I've never had ceramics so it's a lot of like sculpture ceramics

00:49:03.740 and every single one has been drawn on by me and then also there's 22 karat gold on each one so

00:49:12.920 it's sort of this thing where I'm tapping into this idea of gold and alchemy and also pre-colonial

00:49:20.740 Philippines had a lot of gold in it as well so taking a little bit a little nod to my culture

00:49:26.060 and that was part of the reason it was such an important place to overtake was to get all that

00:49:32.680 sweet sweet gold uh yeah and i just i feel like the history of the philippines is something that

00:49:37.720 i am i'm sort of mining if i can say uh every day and there's just so much to learn um and also just

00:49:46.080 like growing up in canada you know you don't really you don't hear about it every day obviously

00:49:51.340 i don't um my parents didn't really sit me down and say here's some history books now read about

00:49:56.840 like where you come from so it's a kind of thing where and i think everybody does this they go back

00:50:02.460 and they unravel their histories a little at a time.

00:50:06.860 And that's really what my work is about and me as well

00:50:10.160 is that taking apart things and unpacking things slowly

00:50:13.980 and processing them in between.

00:50:16.760 And then putting them back together in your own...

00:50:19.160 Yeah, weaving it together differently and creating my own mythology.

00:50:22.100 And then you've got another show.

00:50:24.600 Yeah, in Edmonton at the Art Gallery of Alberta,

00:50:27.300 there's an exhibition there called Surface Tether

00:50:29.220 and it's featuring a lot of my big paintings

00:50:33.100 as well as some photography of tattooing that I've done.

00:50:36.700 And there's some landscape work in there too, right?

00:50:39.040 Yeah, it's actually, so surface tether really deals with body as a landscape

00:50:43.100 and landscape as bodies.

00:50:44.720 Which makes perfect sense in tattooing, that relationship.

00:50:47.480 Exactly.

00:50:47.900 Yeah, so I have in that exhibition some very big paintings

00:50:52.340 with Aswang sort of decomposing in the land.

00:50:56.280 I have ink drawings of the Aswang shrouded figures

00:50:58.900 there's a lot of just very still quiet paintings of landscapes desert scapes almost with gradient

00:51:07.360 skies and then photography that was a collaboration with Stacy Watson and it's a it's a session a

00:51:16.280 tattoo session that I have with my friend Lou Bear who I tattooed across their chest one of my desert

00:51:22.960 landscapes so it's really like an amalgamation of all of the things I talk about and kind of

00:51:27.300 happened in that one session and again we see this a lot in witchcraft where we take things that

00:51:31.860 might not necessarily make sense in other people's minds to put together yeah and put them together

00:51:36.460 to manifest new and different things new possibilities new possibilities and all kinds

00:51:41.100 of choice yeah exactly so before we completely run out of bandwidth here help me wrap it up like

00:51:47.820 what is the gospel according to marigold santos um that you are empowered and that you always are

00:51:53.220 that you are empowered and that you always are.

00:51:56.360 I'm going to say that one more time.

00:51:57.840 No, you are.

00:51:58.520 You say it one more time for the people in the back row.

00:52:01.500 That you are empowered and that you always are.

00:52:04.120 Thank you so much, Marigold.

00:52:05.640 Thank you, Amy.

00:52:06.040 You're an absolute delight.

00:52:07.100 And y'all, if you're in Montreal, if you're in Edmonton,

00:52:09.900 we're going to post links.

00:52:11.140 Go and check out Marigold's art.

00:52:12.820 I mean, you heard us talking about it.

00:52:14.540 Now go experience it.

00:52:16.000 We love you. 1.00

00:52:17.180 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:52:20.080 Be a witch. 1.00

00:52:21.440 Be a witch. 1.00

00:52:21.860 Be a witch. 1.00

00:52:22.200 Be a witch. 1.00

00:52:23.220 you must be a witch 0.95

00:52:25.080 thanks for listening to the Missing Witches podcast 0.98

00:52:27.320 be sure to come back Sunday

00:52:28.920 where we hear the story of another

00:52:30.880 Philippinex marvel

00:52:32.900 warrior witch

00:52:34.580 Babylon Uduja

00:52:36.440 and hit us up at

00:52:38.560 missingwitches at gmail.com

00:52:40.100 or on social media at

00:52:41.860 missingwitches and blessed be

Missing Witches - March 27, 2019

Witches Found： Art Magic With Marigold Santos

Episode Stats

Transcript