Dano Santana
Stuart Sandford

D: I am a huge fan of your work.

S: Thank you so much.

D: I was introduced to your art and you as an artist because of the sculpture you did with Sebastian Sauvé. I feel like that is something you might hear a lot because you worked with him during those years when Sebastian was this kind of top model. He was getting a lot of recognition from the fashion industry and then all of a sudden, he is doing something with fine art, which was new and very cool.

S: It was great actually because when I had the idea to do the statue, which was always intended to be the selfie statue, I didn’t know at the time who the statue would be of. But, actually, Sebastian was great. When I had the idea of Sebastian Sauvé, and in my mind he was perfect, I just emailed him. He told me he had seen one of my series, called Cumfaces, which coincidentally was actually the first time that worked with the selfie. The Cumfaces series was in 2007, followed by another series in 2010, which was also done with the selfie. The Sebastian statue is the sort of the third iteration of the selfie. So I had this continually evolving idea, and I just needed to find the right person.

D: And Sebastian and the selfie?

S: Sebastian was perfect. He has this fantastic classical profile. His nose, his lips, and his chin.

D: Like a Greek God.

S: Exactly, Greco-Roman sculptures and statues were one of the inspirations behind the work. Especially because one of the biggest inspirations was this real-life guy called Antinous. Antinous was Emperor Hadrian’s boy lover back in 120 AD, and he was supposed to be the most beautiful boy that ever lived. When Antinous died, Emperor Hadrian commissioned more statues, paintings and likenesses of him than any other figure in Greco-Roman History. Through that process, he became worshipped, and he became an idol, and people turned that into a religion. There are lots of statues of Antinous, but there is one significant statue, there is no real title or name, but some call it Standing. Anyways, he is in a position where he is looking slightly downwards, and his left arm is extended as though he could be looking at his hand, and so that was the pose that I had Sebastian stand in. He is looking into the camera and taking the selfie.

D: Which is cool.

S: Thank you, thank you.

D: It’s also really cool for you to be in Mexico right now, and I don’t know if it was a coincidence because I do know that your friend Hector is here, but all of these interviews and all of these photoshoots going on are related to Pride because it is the month of June.

S: Yeah, Pride month, yeah.

D: Yes, Pride month and the big celebration will take place on the last Saturday of the month here in Mexico.

S: Oh, I won’t be here then.

D: Aw, well that’s our Pride. I always try to do something related to Pride, but I also want to do something interesting with people who are inside of the LGBTQI+ community; people that are trying to do more with the community, or trying to put out something like a statement. I know a little something about your art and you within the community, but can you tell us about your work in your own words?

S: Sure, so I work with photography, and I work with sculpture, painting, installation. I graduated from art school in 2006, so I have been making work ever since then. For me, what the work is about is when we’re teenagers, and when we’re an adolescent, we are trying to figure out who we are, our identity, our sexuality. When we form these ideas and these opinions, we are gathering from our friends, from our parents, from media, from many different sources and many different influences, and it’s about trying to figure out who we are. That desire to understand is kind of where the basis for all my work is. Not only is it about discovering, but about building the person you are. And so sex and sexuality is imperative within that. When I first started taking photographs, and when the photographs slid into the sculptural work that I’ve been doing mostly more lately, I wasn’t really seeing a lot of celebration and a lot of celebratory depictions of LGBTQI+ people, and I wanted to do that, I wanted to show that. I want my work to always be fun, but not funny. I am very serious about my work but definitely fun and definitely celebratory, and definitely, it is necessary to be visible as LGBTQI+ people.

D: Do your pieces have statements, or do you protest any sentiments through your work?

S: That’s a good question. I feel it is not necessarily a statement because I don’t believe that artists should be telling you, and I don’t think they should be instructing you. I think they should be asking questions. I think they should be prompting you, and I believe that good art should make you think, and it should make you question, and again within visibility and depictions within gay men or lifestyles, I think that is the statement. It’s funny because I was talking with a fellow artist saying, ‘Oh maybe I should write a diary about my trip to Mexico, but also generally, I should write a diary.’ He is a painter, and what he was said to me is ‘Well, I don’t do that because my work is my diary, and it’s my statement.’ I think that should be true. So, I don’t have a specific statement, but my work very much speaks for me, or I want my work to speak for me. Also, I am very conscious that I am a gay man, that I am producing imagery that is gay or queer, and I actually like the word queer a lot. I really like that word. I think it is the visibility that is the most important and that is the statement that I want people to see, for people to feel, and the celebratory fact that yes we have oppression, and repression, and suppression in many, many countries. We face the death penalty for being LGBTQI+ in several countries, and so the visibility and the fact that we are here and we are queer is important.

D: Yes!

S: What is that from? It’s the we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it. It’s the big old statement from, is it ACT UP? I think it is an ACT UP thing?

D: Yes it is a Queer Nation and ACT UP thing. Now, the next question is about your creative process. Can you tell us about how you have developed a piece or a series?

S: It really depends. For example, the new sculpture, Ouroboros. Ouroboros is an ancient Egyptian symbol of the snake or serpent eating its own tail. It is a symbol of fertility, eternal youth, and the changing of the seasons. I have a collector from Switzerland who just came to me and said, ‘Oh, I would love to have a sculpture of a guy sucking his own dick,’ and I thought to myself, that’s kind of boring, I’m not into interested in that depiction. Although there is sex in my work, I don’t consider my work to be erotic. I am not interested in turning you on, I am interested in making you think, but not necessarily in giving you a hard-on. If that happens, then that is perfectly fine, but that is not my intention. So, when he came to me, I was a little unsettled, but then when I thought about it and was researching the idea of the Ouroboros, it made sense to create this figure, this very classical idea, and merge the two together. I had been working a lot with traditional concepts. Again, with the Sebastian, and with these historic materials again, the bronze and the marble. That’s the way that I was thinking, in a classical sense. Because I don’t just want to have a painting of a dick or a photograph of a dick and have no narrative to it. For me, the narrative is critical, and I want you to look at a piece of mine and assume that there is a narrative behind it. For example, with my photographic work, I always want you to think there is a narrative there, even if you’re just looking at one image, there is certainly a narrative behind it. I also like the idea that you look at my work as a whole. So you look at my photography, then into the sculptures, then into the paintings, and that you can see the narrative and this story that’s happening within the work becomes evident. I always want to make sure that there is a story you can connect to.

D: For me, it is exciting to see that your work has a sense of fashion or edginess. Is that something you do intentionally, or does it just happen? For example, the Sebastian seems obviously connected to fashion because he is a well-known model, but with Cumfaces, there was something nuanced in the images that made it feel substantially fashionable, but also very clearly fine art.

S: I definitely see that. When I first started taking photographs, I was very much influenced by photographers such as Wolfgang Tillmans, who comes from the sort of snapshot culture. Although he never did any fashion photography. And Nan Goldin, who also didn’t do fashion photography, but instead had the snapshot aesthetic. So I think what you are seeing came from that. Actually though, back in the day, I did a couple of fashion shoots, but I didn’t really enjoy it at all because I wasn’t in control. I had to tell a narrative that I suppose I wasn’t interested in telling. Someone else’s story. I definitely see it though, specifically within the photography and with the Sebastian statue. Because of who I chose, that choice does have that fashion edge, and that’s something I’m delighted to have. I mean, I very much consumed magazines when I was younger; The Face, ID, Dazed and Confused, which I think filters in too. Just like watching TV, it’s not a TV, but were watching billboards and advertisements just like we watch TV, it definitely filters into our psyche and into our consciousness.

D: So was Sebastian a conscious or unconscious decision? Or a bit of both?

S: The thing with Sebastian and being a fashion model was really interesting because I did want someone who was known, if you were in that world, you knew who he was. And if you weren’t in that world, then you didn’t kind of know or care. I definitely thought about the fact that he has an identity, and I knew I wanted to slightly remove him from the fashion world and take him into a fine art context. That was part of the process and the project itself. Now, the underwear he is wearing in the statue is Zara. He told me one story about when he went to a Zara casting for kids. Well, Sebastian is like 6’ 4, I mean, he’s huge. He turned up, and at first, they were like, ‘what the hell, he’s too big,’ and they were turning him away. But somehow, he did it, he got the job because they decided he had the perfect look for it in the end. Those are the underwear he had on. I don’t think they were Zara Kids, but they were his, the ones he is wearing as the statue.

D: How has it been working in CDMX? Did you come to CDMX to work?

S: Originally I came here to do an exhibition. I planned this exhibition with a gallery, and I was going to do the work here. We would have been exhibiting around now, actually, around June. But it didn’t happen, because the gallerist, and I’m not sure what happened, but he just stopped returning my calls, messages, emails, and I just..

D: You got ghosted.

S: Yeah! He ghosted me. I didn’t come here for that show only, but that was potentially the main reason, was to make the work here, and to have this exhibition.

D: Wow, I’m really sorry.

S: It’s totally fine. It turns out I am kind of glad that I didn’t do it because I already feel as though the work that I was going to make was very much focused on a romantic situation, an ex-boyfriend. I was going to recontextualize the relationship and make a whole body of work around it. Later I realized I already did that with a previous project, so why do that again and why was I revisiting it? Even though it didn’t happen, and that’s a shame, it’s better because it made me move further on with my work and with other projects. I’ve been working on other projects here. I have an exhibition which I curated here and is in Los Angeles. I did most of the curation work here, and I’ve been working on two new commissions as well. So, I have been working plenty, but of course, I have been trying to explore the city, meet people, and I’ve been trying to learn Spanish. It’s funny, a couple of people back in Los Angeles, where I am based, were saying, ‘ Oh I would love to go to Mexico for four months, six months.’ I have to remind people, I’m not here for a vacation, I’m here to work. I wish I were on holiday for four or six months, that would be something special, but no, I am happy here, happy to be working. The new commission, it’s a new selfie statue with a guy called Sean Ford. He is an adult entertainer, and this commission came from a big collector of mine in London. We did the 3D scanning for the sculpture here. He was in Mexico City for a party, and so I brought my 3D scanning guy and got it done here.

D: The next question was going to be why Mexico City, but that kind of answered it.

S: It was the exhibition, but also, living in Los Angeles, it’s very, you know, it’s the only major American city that isn’t white Anglo-Saxon influenced. It is Latin American, it is South American. It has a very different energy and a very different vibe. When I started meeting people in LA, I started making friends with a lot of Mexican-Americans and some from South America, or other parts of Latin America. It piqued my interest in coming to Mexico and exploring. So that was another reason to come here. Growing up in England, I never had any exposure to Latin American culture or Mexican culture, so for me, to come and explore that, to think about it and to educate myself, was another reason for coming.

D: So far, what’s been the most inspirational part of your stay?

S: I think it’s just the people. The people that I’m meeting and the energy in this city is something special. The art, like the fine art scene and the art scene here, seems to be really, really, really, something special right now. The energy here for that is an inspiration. You know when you’re in a space, and you have to create in a vacuum? When you’re surrounded by lots of other creative energies, it can be tough because you’re battling against your own desire to create. You are fighting this vacuum of known creativity. But here, it doesn’t seem to feel that way. It feels as though there is *snapping* something happening. I mean that’s what you have when you have a city of what, 21 million people? It is constantly *snaps* like this *snaps*

D: As a foreigner, how do you see the LGBTQI+ community in Mexico?

S: Thriving and vibrant. Before I came here, I knew this group of guys who did this party, Traición. I met them in LA, so I knew that that was happening here. It’s extremely vibrant. And then my roommate, he takes part in the Vogue Balls, and I went to a couple, they were great. It has this underground energy. Obviously you can go to Zona Rosa and see the same old stuff that you can find in any place, but still, it has this underground spirit, like the Traición party, and like Pervert.

D: Is there something else that you want to add?

S: I mean, this was a pleasure, and thank you very much, I have had a wonderful time here.

D: Well, thank you for this opportunity and for giving me a little bit of your time. I never thought I would interview you.

S: That is actually really flattering.

D: I think I saw your first stuff on Facebook or something like that. I thought it was so cool because I used to love Sebastian, as you know he was on all the covers, and then he posted some of your work. At first, I thought he was selling his own series until I checked further and discovered you.

S: Actually, one thing that we might be doing is because he said to me, ‘oh we need to make the big one.’ Because the whole plan was to do an 8-foot version, that was the plan from the start. He wrote to me a month or so ago, and he was saying well, we need to finally do it. He said, ‘Let’s try to raise some money through crowdfunding or Kickstarter so that we have the money to do it.’ He told me that if we reach a certain goal, ‘I’ll do a nude version of it,’ and I thought to myself, that would be pretty great. So maybe that will happen at some point. For me, it’s not important that I do a nude version because the reason I had him wearing the briefs was to make the image about a very specific point in time. I wanted this statue to show that we are way less open to nudity, male nudity, than the Greeks or the Romans, were. But we will see, maybe it will happen, perhaps it won’t.