"DREAM ONE" 2022

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Santiago Mostyn 

Born 1981, Yelamu/San Francisco, Ohlone Chochenyo Territory. 

Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. 

Pronouns: he/him 

"DREAM ONE" 2022

vertical single-channel colour video, stereo sound

10:10 minutes

Courtesy of the artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden and Paris, France.

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Santiago Mostyn’s video work DREAM ONE uncovers the hidden and disconcerting feelings of home, belonging, and the reconciling of history inherent to the diasporic experience. In the film, Mostyn engages with the work of prominent Saint Lucia–born poet Derek Walcott (1930–2017), who is re-enacted through human and digital actors. Reciting Walcott’s 1992 Nobel Lecture The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory, and a Trinidadian folklore tale of the mythological douen, DREAM ONE grapples with the sense of identity fragmentation and rootlessness.

The artist incorporates various communicative forms in the work, drawing upon storytelling, photography, film, spoken and written words. Mostyn also employs Lokono, the language of the Arawak (one of the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean), to discern the story and identity of Trinidad and Tobago. The convergence of multiple narratives told in DREAM ONE expands notions of belonging and connection to place, both in the archipelago and in the diaspora. Writing in the The Antilles, Walcott muses:

Break a vase and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole … It is such a love that resembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirloom whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles.