MOYO - Gene Anthony Arcidiacono-Santiago
Noise Music/ Video Art/ Performance Art
Artist Bio:
Gene Anthony Santiago-Holt, also known as MOYOGASH, is a Diasporican multimedia artist, game designer, and performer based in Philadelphia. Their practice weaves together decolonial glitch aesthetics, ancestral memory, and cyborg theory as forms of resistance. Through interactive games, improvised performances, and experimental videos, their work embraces fragmentation, distortion, and the poetic as a means of rejecting linearity and compliance.
They are the creator of MAGIKINGDOM Daymare: Chapter Uno and No Sun For Nu Boricua, and their projects span digital media, drawing, print, sound, and papier-mâché sculpture. These works often function as both standalone objects, performance tools, and glitchy avatars through which identity, pop culture, and diaspora are reimagined.
Santiago-Holt holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and an MFA from the University of Delaware, where they concentrated in sound art and animation. They are currently pursuing a PhD in Digital Media at Drexel University and teach at Drexel and Rowan University. Their work has been exhibited at Vox Populi, The Delaware Contemporary, the Glitter Box Theater, WIRWIR in Berlin, and PiranesiLAB in Moscow.
Artist Statment
In my work, I tell the story of personal grief stemming from generational trauma and family depression. Being of both Puerto Rican and European descent has left a disconnection within myself. I show the loss of culture and the ties that I have with my ancestors. In my current work, I mix family photos with animated illustrations and appropriated imagery. I accompany them with audio collages of field recordings, synthesizers, and glitches. The audio embodies the feeling of anxiety I've experienced being of mixed heritage. I distort the image to try to change the past, yet the images constantly play over in a loop. The past dictates the future, no matter how hard I try to erase it. Pockets of time are broken down and rearranged with added memories. Some memories change over time, as I discover more details of my past. I achieve this in film with intertwining portraits from my youth in different stages of development. But the disconnection with my culture is what keeps me searching for true answers. My work is contradictory in nature and it questions its existence as I do with myself. This is done with having different characters fade in and out from the film loops and breaking the loop but still enforcing it. Things constantly change but still stay the same, giving the feeling of being trapped.
