Curtis Talwst Santiago is a magician with the fingers of a fairy. Yet, magician as he is, he’s a wise one: he won’t use powder or philters for hypnotic ends because he has more effective assets up his sleeve, forged by a creative imagination focused on counteracting the traumas of history. He moves forward, cautiously, like a tracker in the heart of the tropical forest on the trail of a perfume, retrieving it as if by miracle here and there along the way. Losing it too, sometimes. This magnanimous tracker doesn’t know what he’s after, he only has the conviction that he’ll know it when he sees it, from far off or from behind. In a delicate, subtle way, the tracker can give way to the Creole storyteller who will display, under our astonished eyes, now miniature universes set in luxurious cases, now colossal paintings. Works sometimes only three or four years old, sometimes as old as four or five centuries. In short, works that are in turn both younger and more ancient than we are. And preceding us in the oblivion we are already slipping into..
In the space of an instant, for the time of a daydream, we have the illusion of holding the world in the palm of our hand, and with it, the capacity to help and rescue it. To slow down its race to the abyss. And now we, too, are taken over by the irreverence, mischievousness and joy of Curtis Talwst Santiago. [Excerpt from the text by Abdourahman Waberi]
