We were lucky to catch up with Santiago Molina recently and have shared our conversation below.

Santiago, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Has your work ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized?

My experience with the world is one of like a caged bird who remembers how to fly. During my childhood, my family raised me as a free bird, but then as I grew up and experienced life, I felt like I was being put into a cage, and still today I feel the same way. Not only regarding my artistry but just who I am. So every day is a conscious decision of not letting the world keep me in a cage. Whenever I create something visual such as self-portrait, I write a poem, and share my digital camera’s footage, some people wonder if that is art, or some would say there is “too much going on” or just nothing at all, and he is just calling “that” art. Even when I am acting, a lot of my choices are questioned. I am never in an in-between, but that is also because of my artistic vision and objective which is to never be casual, I rather be controversial, and not live in that limbo where my work is just observed. I rather have my work be loved or hated. My purpose with anything visual I create, from self-portraits to footage collection is the objective of being intimate or a part of my life, and this is what I feel is the most misunderstood because it does not have a huge pre-production behind it, I am not a professional photographer, I call myself an artist, but I do not even know what that is. I am just me and I am sharing with the world what goes on behind my eyes, and my mind, and that is why I love being exposed in my camera, on my terms, in a very raw way, and is the same way I want to portray the characters I play in acting, in a very raw human way, which is what I find to be the beauty of humanity. So, I feel the world misunderstands that concept of rawness because I just put it all out there in my art, and that is too much for some people and I understand. Even when I talk about gender, I would say my work is genderless and chaotic, and a lot of people do not get the meaning of those things, they just want to see something pretty and entertaining when it comes to art.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I hate labels, so I have never really identified myself with being put into a specific box. When people ask what my gender is or what are your pronouns, my answer is I was born a male, and my pronouns are he/ him/they, but women mostly raised me, so my femininity is very predominant in me, but I am a man if you want an answer. It may sound like a contradiction but this is why I do not like the idea of gender, we are humans with both feminine and masculine pieces in ourselves. I would say the label I fit the most is being called an artist. I am an actor, who graduated from the two-year conservatory of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts on the New York City Campus. Before that, I had immersed myself in the arts in my school in Pereira, Colombia where I led the Arts Society; a community of students for students that opened 9 artistic programs for other students to collaborate and learn about the specific craft they wanted to immerse themselves in, having a parallel human growth and development. We had an international arts festival every year and I was the creative director and organizer. Moreover, I have been writing from a very young age; I was actually going to publish a short story when I was 10 years old, but it was a whole arrangement with the publisher in Spain, and we had to raise all this money and my family just could not focus on that at the moment because we were all dealing with my aunt being diagnosed with cancer. I began to immerse myself in the world of prose in 2020, and since then that is where all my writing lives. Around that time as well, in 2020-2021, the camera that same aunt had given me five years ago turned on and I started playing around with it. It started with me taking pictures but then I was in front of the lens, and I have never had a tripod, I have always used whatever I have around me, and then I started recording videos with it, and eventually began doing video edits with those videos. So since then, self-portraits have become my way of keeping track of my existence and recording it, to not be forgotten by the world. Everything I do is connected, my acting, my photography, my writing, they are all part of the story of my life, and only by seeing all of them, you can get a glimpse of who I am. With the years, my work began to touch upon specific topics that also reflect who I am such as gender, sexuality, latininidad, grief, and transformation. My work is very personal because I believe that art must be personal, there should not be any curtain covering what is truly behind the creator of the artistic creation.

Furthermore, regarding clients, I am available to act, and direct plays or any artistic piece as my line of work is physical theatre, which I am still learning about. Also, I am open to creating content for brands with my self-portraits and my existing footage or creating new footage. I have also experience in dramaturgical analysis and writing.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I would say everything I learned in acting school. But it’s not like unlearning the lesson, everything I learned already lives inside of me and is part of who I am, so now I think it’s about letting go of the lessons and just trusting they live within me. Because every time I am acting my main concern is, wait, am I acting or am I truly living this experience as this character who is a piece of who I am? The realization behind this was my first time performing after school at Theaterlab, and then at La MaMa, with Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks; where my specific task was to build Tim Clifford’s milk bottles and cannons, and the main note I would get from Yoshiko was “don’t perform,” you are a technician, that’s it. And that made me reflect on my job as an actor and I consider it the one of a technician, it is not about me, it is about doing the task of telling the story, and not bringing the feeling to the camera or the stage, but just being present. So I hate the word perform because I am not performing, I am being present, and I think I will continue to learn this until the day I die.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I am always overwhelmed by my existence. I am very influenced by Frida Kahlo, Kafka, Auster, Sylvia Plath, and Chavela Vargas, all of them either existential or extreme lovers until love felt like pain. So a few years ago when I got to the realization that I could not live all the lives I wanted, I realized art was the only place where I could live multiple lives within one, and that is my goal driving my creative journey, to live multiple lives in one life. Frida Kahlo’s quote “I paint self-portraits because I am the person I know best. I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to and I paint whatever passes through my head without any consideration,” is what inspired me to do self-portraits.

Furthermore, I am a very proud Latino and Colombian, and my biggest goal is to keep the Colombian name high and show the world my culture through me as an artist and as a vessel for those stories to keep being told. I want my language and my accent to be enough in the industry. I say this because the industry still cares about my accent, and I am asked sometimes to speak more clearly, it makes me wonder whether I want to act more in English than in Spanish, and I don’t think so. I want to act more in my own language, and eventually in French, but not only in English. I love my language too much to let it in the back seat. My language is who I am. So I want to get to the point in my career where Santiago Molina’s acting in Spanish is enough to be considered for an Academy Award.

Before I left Colombia, a close friend of mine told me: go and let your art save the world, and I would say that is my mission. I don’t know specifically what that means, but I think the answers will come as I continue to choose life and love.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://santimoliv.wixsite.com/santiagomolina
• Instagram: @molinaestuvoaqui
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/santiago-molina-b03a422b5
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Molinaestuvoaqui

Image Credits

Photo in color: Diego Arias

All the rest of the photos: Santiago Molina