jonathan santos

Halloween 2010.

In the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time, furthers Santos’ examination of specific sites and their cultural significance. Reminiscent of an institutional setting, the clocks are set to the capital cities governed by dictators on Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International’s top five worst offenders lists. Through the medium of time, Santos places the viewer in direct connection with disparate, and often forgotten, locations around the world.

Chloe Zaug
Curatorial Associate
Winter 2010

In A Minute of Silence is an interpretation of the view from a fatally wounded soldier as he falls to the ground. Filmed at the site of the Battle of Lexington Green, the fall has been slowed and looped eight times, once for each minuteman killed during the battle. Santos is interested in the sentiments of discontent and disloyalty that reverberated along with optimism and hope during this significant moment in American history and how it has affected the nation’s cultural identity.

Chloe Zaug
Curatorial Associate
Winter 2010

The Storefront Library is a temporary public library for a community in Boston which has been without its own branch of the Boston Public Library since it was closed and demolished as part of the Central Artery construction in 1956.  DMU sees this project as a way to increase the visibility of a distinctive Boston neighborhood and help sustain the vitality of a community which culturally serves not only Boston but the greater New England area. Fall 2009

The Department of Micro-Urbanism [Marrikka Trotter and Jonathan Santos, co-founders] is an art and design initiative aimed at mapping terrains, discovering relationships, addressing issues and exploiting opportunities at the pedestrian urban scale.  The initiative’s mission is to expand the space of possibility for agonistic public action, interaction and involvement by initiating, supporting, and realizing creative interventions in the everyday landscape and by increasing public understanding and appreciation of the historical and contemporary political, infrastructural, and socio-economic flows and forces which shape this common terrain.  While participants for each project vary, the Department of Micro-Urbanism draws from a loose network of artists, designers, architects, community leaders and individuals who share the desire to reinforce public space, rethink and extend the possible, and engender and engage in alternative tactics of practice.