Commissioned and Presented by the Fondation des États-Unis as part of le Politique du Corps (2024) exposition, curated by Eve Grinstead.

In this household, O.K. to wave (2024) is a performance and installation that utilizes text from George Saunders’ short story, The Semplica Girl Diaries (2012), imagines suburban domesticity as a sight of horror underpinned by unrecognized labor.

Four dresses, alternating blue and white, hang on a fishing line across the gallery. The dresses were handsewn for Santiago by her Grandmother, Esmeralda Tomala (b. Guayaquil, 1936, d. New York, 2021), who immigrated to the United States from Ecuador in 1960. Throughout her life, Tomala worked in clothing factories as a seamstress in New York, often hand sewing pieces for her family for special occasions. Santiago considers this piece a collaborative project with her grandmother.

“The Semplica-Girl Diaries" by George Saunders was originally published in the October 15, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.

Performance, cotton fabric, fishing line. 

Featuring text by George Saunders and dresses by Esmeralda Tomala. 

communion (2024) features Santiago's destroyed first communion dress, originally hand-sewn for her by her grandmother, Esmeralda Tomala. The same fabric and detailing was used to sew Santiago’s mothers’ wedding dress, and each other family member’s ceremonial dresses. With the goal of fitting back into the childhood garment, Santiago modified the dress to make it wearable for her adult body. The ripped fabric marks the dress as both an object of beauty and a site of familial, corporeal, and ideological tension.