Between January and April 2025, Colombian-born artist Santiago Tamayo Soler presented two exhibitions in Québec: Veneno en la Sangre at Centre Clark and Postales at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) as part of its Contemporary Art Awards. 

For a little over two months, Veneno en la Sangre occupied one of the galleries at Centre Clark. The multimedia installation draws on the telenovela, a genre deeply rooted in the Latin American imaginary, and examines relations shaped by coloniality from a queer and speculative perspective. Through post-apocalyptic imagery, the project exposes extractivist economies, asking whether survival is possible under such conditions. Framed within a broad world-building practice, the project stages the universe of a fragmented TV show, with a video work at its core. 

Santiago Tamayo Soler’s exhibition greets the viewer with a TV hanging on the wall, showing a DVD menu loading. The optical disc icon pulses in the corner to inform us that an episode is about to begin. Chapters, languages, extras all seem selectable, and yet, this sense of control is only part of the setup. We quickly realize that the interface is a decoy that turns paratext into dramaturgy, and menu, index, publicity, poster become the stage. When “play” is pressed, we discover a world set after a human-made calamity, where two male protagonists are in an impossible love story, as smoke and slow violence thicken the

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