While comparing magic and science in The Savage Mind, Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that the former was like a shadow (sombra) moving ahead of its origin, or a projection that anticipates the body that produces it. For the anthropologist, magic was a complete and well-articulated system—finished and coherent—rather than some earlier or more “primitive stage” of a subsequent scientific development. By both tracking and departing from these penumbral specters, Rather like a shadow / Más bien sombra insists on a plurality of knowledge forms, thereby reevaluating the importance of ethical and aesthetic experience in the formation of social and political worlds. While taking up these questions, the book—published in K. Verlag‘s Processing Process series—is no less an itinerary of the work and practice of artist Santiago Borja. Borja generates speculative analogies between the system of modern thought and other forms of knowledge that are alleged to be symptomatic of a certain malaise suffered under the weight of an imposed rationalism, when they are not definitely alien to such claims. The book includes visual essays of Borja’s site-specific work and is interspersed with texts by eight renowned authors. Through models, photographic techniques, graphic and textile designs, and site-specific interventions, Borja enters conversations about inherently tense topics past and present, embracing their complexity as a way to affirm the need to acknowledge a perspectival multiplicity that both pre-exists and resists all absolutist versions of reality.

Santiago Borja is an artist from Mexico whose work intersects art, anthropology, and architecture. He creates installations and architectural interventions that juxtapose cultural traditions with modern and contemporary design and theory. Borja’s recent projects delve into marginal and alternative belief systems, focusing on how these beliefs manifest in objects, traditional construction methods, and collective practices that express alternative ways of understanding life. His work has been showcased internationally, including at the Museo Amparo, the Mexican Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennial, Le Quadrilatère, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona, the Freud Museum London, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Villa Savoye, and the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City.