Roots and Bonds

Artists

Belen Santamarina

Text by Danni Cheng & Issra Marie Martin

Not a single day goes by untouched by the influence of the chain. The line of raw materials, workers, and vehicles that provide consumer goods. Transfers from bus to train, train to bus on a daily commute. Habits, likenesses, and knowledge inherited over generations. The body, fuelled by the decomposition of molecular structures. These links—some seen, some felt—compose a vast, entangled web that shapes how we live, move, and relate.

In her first UK solo show, Roots and bonds, Argentinian artist Belen Santamarina explores this pervasive entanglement through her sustained engagement with the medium of human hair. Collected over six years from loved ones and strangers, disembodied tresses have made their way from scalp to studio, each strand an archive of accumulated care, labour, migration and time. Tenderly unsnarled and spun into thread, Santamarina entwines strands from disparate bodies, geographies, and timelines to produce installations that straddle textile work and sculpture, the familiar and the uncanny.

At the centre of the show is Entanglement, a suspended 30-metre-long chain meticulously crocheted from gathered hair. Each stitch conjoins with hundreds of others to form a sheet-like continuum, which is then knotted into tubular chain structures. Through this process, Santamarina constructs a bridge between the discrete and continuous, where single strands of hair and their embedded histories are woven into a densely networked form that resists disconnection. The resulting chain beckons us to consider how we are fundamentally bound to one another across bodies, borders, and systems.

Presented alongside Entanglement is a series of graphite drawings, Threads, and a poem installation, Take me, which extend Santamarina’s enquiry into the relationships between material, memory, and language. These textual works treat hair not just as inert matter but as a transmitter of thought, a medium through which the energy of language and experience is carried across migratory pathways.

In Roots and bonds, chains appear as the foundational material, technique, formal expression, and overarching symbol of Santamarina’s work. They hold together molecules, communities, and networks of global exchange. They dictate how bodies are constrained and mobilised. They structure everyday experience. Through hair—a material at once intimate, estranged, and expansive—Roots and Bonds renders visible the complex systems in which we are all entangled.

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Through the use of hair, soil, seeds and food as materials, Belen Santamarina (b.1993, Buenos Aires) explores the autobiographical and confessional to create tapestries, objects and installations. Her works engage with personal and collective migration experiences and the use of memories hybridised with science fiction and the natural world to imagine and propose alternative narratives to dominant discourses. Santamarina employs crafts historically secluded to the feminine and domestic space to investigate relations of power between fine arts and craft. She has exhibited her work in Argentina, Taiwan, Spain, USA and UK and was awarded the Honorary Mention at the Taoyuan International Art Award 2023 in Taiwan.

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Danni Cheng (she/her) is a Taiwanese-Turkish writer and curator based in London, by way of Istanbul. Currently a Curatorial Fellow on the New Curators programme, her work often interrogates the Asian diasporic condition in its convergence with corporeal feminisms, chronic illness and posthumanisms. Previously, Danni worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Cromwell Place, and most recently as Programme Coordinator at Delfina Foundation.

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Issra Marie Martin (she/her) is a writer, editor, and art worker from Tkaronto/Toronto who has worked in various community-oriented roles in Canada and Vietnam since 2017. Her interest in contemporary art began with questions of affect, memory, and diaspora, and she is drawn to interdisciplinary approaches to exhibition-making as well as the craft of art writing. Currently, she is a Curatorial Fellow at New Curators and on the Editorial Committee at Peripheral Review.