This week on Common Shapes podcast, I’m sharing the mic with my friend Tamara Santibañez for a conversation about oral histories, tattooing, freelancing, and art as activism.
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“I love talking about these things with people. I love listening to other people. That’s something that I try to be really adamant about in spaces where I’m writing, teaching, or saying what I think. Just being like, “I don’t know. What do you think?” Because that’s how we arrive at meaning together. That’s how we arrive at meaning and action collectively. ”
Tune in to hear us discuss—
🌼 Tamara’s studio practice
🌼 Oral histories & oral traditions
🌼 Tattooing as liberation work
🌼 How to balance many projects as a freelancer
🌼 Making time for movement work
🌼 Coalitions & political responsibility
🌼 The different feelings/functions/forms of Instagram vs Substack
Links
🩰 Subscribe to Tamara’s Substack
🩰 Get Tamara’s book, Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work
🩰 Get the Creative Ideation Portal
🩰 Sign up for my weekly newsletter, Monday Monday
🩰 Find all these links & more at marleegrace.space/commonshapes
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[0:00] Hello and welcome to Common Shapes, a podcast about practices, systems, and rituals for a creative life.
[0:07] Music.
[0:15] It is one of the greatest blessings of my life to interview artists about their process and their practice and their commitment to social and political movements, their hopes and dreams and visions.
And today on the podcast, I am interviewing Tamara Santibanez about all of those things.
Tamara is an amazing painter, ceramicist, sculptural artist.
[0:44] They are a tattooer. They're the author of Could This Be Magic?
Tattooing as Liberation Work.
And Tamara is also an oral historian. And we get to talk about how all of these things weave together, their commitment to abolition and how it intersects with art making.
We talk about showing up as queer people, non-binary people in the world, how everything weaves together.
And it is my hope that this episode serves your own practice and commitment to the work at hand, both in your own life and in the world.
[1:28] If you haven't already, you can download the Creative Ideation Portal, which is a three-day, guide to visioning your projects and bringing them into the world. You can find it at marleygrace.space slash common shapes. It pairs nicely with the first four episodes of Common Shapes. And also, I think that just as you are listening to Tamara and I speak about our own work, And if you're feeling excited and inspired to dream up your own projects, and how they can be of service, the Creative Ideation Portal supports you in doing that.
So as you listen, may you keep an open mind and prepare for your own expansion, and may it serve your practice and your process. and I hope you enjoy this episode of Common Shapes.
[2:23] Welcome to Common Shapes. Tamara, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
I'm so excited to be on the podcast. And I have been ever since you first told me about it and that you wanted me to come on it.
And ever since it came into the world, that excitement has just been building with every new little episode that is birthed.
Thank you so much, friend. Thank you, thank you. I'm looking at you in your studio in New York City.
You are a tattoo artist. You have written a book.
You are just an amazing artist in so many different ways and mediums.
Tell us a little bit about your studio, maybe a day in the studio life, anything you wanna share about your painting practice.
[3:12] Right, well, we started off the recording with this gorgeous view of my like sun dappled painting area with my huge paintings that I'm trying to finish currently.
And now you get to look at a less cute view of my sink and my storage. I love that.
Yeah, so I guess like you said, I am an interdisciplinary artist is the term that feels the most broad and useful.
And I work mostly, I do a lot of painting. I do a lot of ceramic work.
I also do some leather tooling and incorporate all of those things into a more sculptural and multimedia visual practice.
When you arrive in the studio, Do you have any rituals or?
[4:04] Practices to start the day? Like, how do you decide which painting you want to go towards? Or if you want to be looking at ceramics? Like, how do you even decide where to start on any given day once you're in the space?
That I would say is a rhythm that I'm still trying to learn how to how to work with a little bit more and how to get dialed in because everything I do is very time intensive. I don't do a lot of quick sketches or renderings that are final products. So, you know, for the paintings to take shape, they really just do need many days of me sitting down and putting a number of hours into them, which is hard.
It's a hard flow to get into. Some days I come to the studio, I'm here for 10 hours and I do nothing. Sometimes I come to the studio, I'm here for two hours and I get into the flow and I make huge amounts of progress. So that's something that I'm trying to be, more accepting about is just the showing up every day and knowing that different amounts of focus will happen from time to time. And when I usually when I get here in the morning, I usually start by burning a little bit of incense, just trying to get a sense of.
[5:18] What I want to work on, looking around at everything, just saying hi to all the work that's in progress and just taking stock of what stages of being finished they're at.
And ceramics is the same way. Ceramics is so cyclical in terms of having to think of the stages, like the drying time, the firing time, the different rounds of greenware, to bisque, to glazing.
So that's something that's sort of always in the background of knowing, OK, I have to attend to the stage of ceramics today. maybe I'll start my day with that.
And then once I'm done, I'll go and do some painting.
One thing that I love about your painting and your ceramics and in your tattoo practice is the theme of flowers.
You use calla lilies in a lot of your work and you have a tattoo shop that's literally called Flower World.
Can you tell me a little bit about why you love flowers?
[6:12] I love this question. And I'm so happy to answer. I keep joking that I'm in my flower era, because I've historically just been such a goth guy. And a lot of my early work and we still today, like the themes remain. But so much of my early work was just making images of ice, these isolated objects with really taboo associations, whether they were leather boots or a leather jacket, or, you know, what have you and sort of isolating them to make visible just the assumptions of the viewer, right? If you just see the object, what readings are you bringing to it? A lot of accessories of subculture. And that's still something that I am consistently exploring. But I don't know. I mean, the world is a very heavy place and flowers are equally laden with symbolism.
[7:13] They're just not as edgy upon first glance, you know? They're something that can be really welcoming, really benign, but are subject to just infinite, like, manifold interpretations, depending on your cultural associations, your personal history. And I wrote this poem some time ago about how, this is a little bit dark, but about how I had gotten flowers at a show that I I had a few years ago, I showed up in the gallery, kind of surprised me with these flowers.
And my first thought based on the interpersonal experiences I was having at the time was like, oh, these flowers are a threat.
A stalker sent these flowers to me. And they hadn't, it was from my brother.
It was actually a really loving gesture of support that no one in my family had really done before.
[8:05] And that moment was really striking to me, right? Because I was like, oh, this bouquet of flowers, something that we might assume is, without question, loving or supportive or celebratory can have the opposite implication, depending on even a moment-to-moment mentality or expectation.
And so maybe that's what the fascination with flowers is, is this very initial impression of them as something of beauty, something of love, and there being all of these more fraught connotations that are just below the surface or just as readily accessible, depending.
And so more recently, I've been trying to track the ways that flower metaphor is used in political movements, right?
There's like the flower in the barrel of a gun, or flower power won't stop fascist power, or even more recently in Hong Kong, somebody was arrested for holding up a bouquet of flowers because the police interpreted it as a protest sign.
And.
[9:09] That's what I've been trying to explore more recently. Calla lilies have their own particular symbolism because of the way that they're used in, Mexican craft, folk traditions, art historical traditions, mural traditions.
But I've been, I guess, especially invested in flowers as visual signifiers of, abundance, wealth, kind of all these key words that you see associated if you're like, oh, I want to send a bouquet of apology. What's the color of apology? It's yellow roses. It's stargazer lilies. What is the flower that says the thing I want to say?
[9:46] And yeah, just trying to encode a meaning or language or a sentence or an impulse through this language of flowers. I've been thinking about it just the last couple days as in Michigan, it's spring is springing right now. And in front of my front door is this huge, rose bush that's on like a trellis. And just in the last couple of days, it started growing.
Like it's now all of its like leaves are out and its thorns are really fresh. And it started growing in front of my door. Like I have to actually duck under it. And at first I was like, oh, I guess I should probably trim this back or something. I'm very new to understanding how to, care for and steward the plants and land that I live on. But then I was like, I really felt the metaphor of protection, like the rose as this flower of self-love and the thorns as this, don't mess with me. And then in the back door where I usually let June out, there's wasps building a nest, which I do understand I might have to get rid of for me and June's safety, but it's like, I'm just noticing these like, protective.
Spinning thing. Mm-hmm.
[11:14] I mean, as someone who just has so many interests, you know, most of my job is a writer but I'm about to go back to school to learn more about quilts and quilt history.
I just love that your main job is as a tattoo artist, that's how many people know you, but you also as we've been talking about are a fine artist and just have so many different hobbies and interests and things that you are committed to.
And then you went to grad school for oral history.
Tell us about why you picked oral history and yeah, let's start like why the hell did you decide, I'm going to go to grad school for oral history.
[11:51] My joke that I find as endlessly amusing is that I have two degrees in two incredibly niche things that people are mostly unfamiliar with. So my undergrad was in printmaking, and people always would say, oh, what, like t-shirts? And now I have a degree in oral history, and people say, oh, what, like podcasts? So it's not new to me to have to explain like what the hell that even is. But I swore I would never go back to grad school, first of all, right? It took me six years to get my bachelor's degree, to get my BFA and I went to three different art schools before I finally got it.
And I really, I think at the time, I was so young when I started school and really believed the idea that college is for everyone and that you just have to find the school or the program that's the right fit for you.
And it took me a long time of, I don't know, bouncing around, fucking around, to realize what I was actually interested in was craft and the handmade, because I originally went to school for fashion design.
And I did fashion design. I was also doing fiber arts, illustration, and I was much more excited by the fiber arts than I was by the design.
[13:11] And I finally went back to school for printmaking, got my, you know, finished my degree, and everyone loved printmaking because it was the punk major.
It was like, you want to make zines and T-shirts and show posters and all of this ephemera. and it was great.
[13:30] But while I was in school, I went straight into tattooing while I was finishing school, so as soon as I was done, I had this career and this sort of new craft that required a lot of my dedication, a lot of my energy, and I just threw myself right into that.
And I guess flash forward to 16 years later, it's been so long, and tattooing has always been, I guess, the nucleus of everything else that I was doing.
But I was doing a lot of other things outside of it, my own artwork, my own studio practice that wasn't, you know, collaborative or commercial in that sense.
And I was also becoming a lot more involved in prison abolition spaces and work.
And so I found myself having, I guess in these more just generally social justice and organizing spaces, feeling a little bit uncertain about how to explain how I got there.
[14:31] Because I was like, I don't know, I'm like a tattoo artist who has a printmaking degree that's a prison abolition enthusiast, here's the experience that I have that maybe helps explain why I'm here, but there just wasn't a short answer for it. And I really was feeling like I needed something to kind of tie the room together. Like I thought about going to law school. I thought about going to social work school. And a client of mine actually told me about this oral history program at Columbia that I felt pretty intrigued by because the work that, my client was doing was interviews with queer elders around the U.S. and just all the projects that they were talking to me about coming from that program were really, really interesting work and touched on all of these things that I was interested in. And I can't remember if it was around the same time or not I had.
I guess what the order of operations was, but I had also trained, done a training for a LGBTQ crisis hotline. And that was a really formative experience, just in understanding, talking to people on the phone, right, who are in these crisis moments.
[15:48] And that really shifted how I saw tattooing, how I saw the exchange of what I, what the client was sharing with me, I was just bringing my attention to the storytelling aspect newly. And I started following this program. I applied once really, really late, kind of at the last minute deadline, I didn't get in, I was on the waitlist, didn't get in. And they were very encouraging that I apply again. So I did. And, you know, the timing was very divine when I finally did end up going because, I got to work with certain professors that hadn't been there the year before. And I would have been there during the pandemic so it would have been all virtual. So it worked out well and it was only a one-year program if you did it full-time and of course trying to be I mean I want to be also transparent that there was a certain strategy and economy to wanting to do that too right because it's very expensive to go to grad school. It really disrupted my career and flow in other areas of my life. I basically didn't see friends for that whole year of my life. But I was like, okay, a year. It's a year. I can do anything for a year. And I'm so glad that I did it. I'm so happy to.
[17:03] Think about storytelling in different ways, because I think that's ultimately what it comes down to. When people ask me what those things all have to do with one another, storytelling is really the answer. And I was surprised by it when I got into the, you know, the nuts and bolts of So this program.
Part of me was like, oh, I kind of feel like I've been doing oral history all along.
This doesn't necessarily feel new.
There's frameworks and there's lineages and there's, you know, pedagogy that feels new to me, but the practice of trust building and this creating the space together and active listening, these are all things that I have been doing for a long time now.
So that was a really interesting thing to go through, especially in one year, because that year feels like time traveling in some senses. I'm like, did that even happen?
Here I am. Where did that time go?
But yeah, I guess storytelling is the answer, the short answer.
[18:09] That's beautiful. I mean, I feel the same of like having a BFA in dance.
Like, I think when people read my writing or see my quilts, they're like, Oh, of course that person has a degree in dance.
It's like the fluid or, you know, the way that your work looks. But yeah, I felt that when I was sort of trying to choose feeling like, Oh, I want more. I want to be in a classroom space and quilt studies. Yeah, it didn't have like a clear link to, well, I do teach quilt class, it does have a clear link. But in some ways, it felt like it didn't have a clear link other than like that's what I'm interested and I actually see it like tying the threads of all the other things together. And it seems like oral history does that sort of for the many different things that you do. So when you're doing an oral history project, do you literally like sit in front of someone and like hit record on a device? Like what does that look like and is there anything you're working on right now you can share with us or something that's exciting you about your own oral history practice?
[19:16] Well, I tend to be of the mind that oral history can look like any number of things, and I think it's important to just give a really brief rundown on the differences between a sort of academically defined oral history with like a capital, I don't know, like a trademark oral history and what people have been doing for as long as humans have had language and exchange, which at least my program calls oral tradition. So I would say, at least in the ways that I've seen it and experienced it, that there are certain distinctions made between those two, do, especially by academic spaces, and.
[20:01] What tends to distinguish the oral history is that it's recorded. So there's an audio record of the exchange, even though there has been so much knowledge passed down through oral tradition, in many different ways and before audio recording capabilities existed. So that is at least the ways that I sort of understand the ways that people distinguish the two. But I think that that distinguishing is really problematic, you know, just as binaries tend to be. And a lot can get lost in trying to categorize one or the other or one of them seeming more legitimate or important or official. I use heavy quotation marks with all of those things. But anyway, all that is to say that I think it was exciting to me to be in oral history school at the time that I was because it's a field that I think is rapidly changing and expanding, at least in my brief time being a part of it. I think that there are a lot of people really challenging the established order of how to do things. Even for example, like having my voice in the recording. A very traditional oral history might really be the interviewer asking questions and then trying to be as silent as possible while the narrator tells their story. But then you have different versions of that where somebody is really having more of a back-to-back.
[21:21] And forth exchange or the interviewer offers more about themselves or you can laugh and have a rapport and even that might some people might consider non-traditional. So it really is so subjective it depends on who you're talking to, where they trained, what generation they're from, but there's also So I think really important queer and trans interventions, even into the idea of chronology in an oral history of like, when does a life begin?
What does a life story look like?
What do familial ties look like? So I'll let us to say that oral history can be so many different things, but it does usually start with sitting down to an interview and recording that interview somehow.
And I like to start by doing that, by doing, usually it's between a one and two hour interview session.
At least for me, it helps to break it up and to come back to it.
Sometimes you wanna listen back to what you've gotten and see if there's things that you forgot to ask or that you want to include to come back to.
And my own work has focused primarily on the intersections between tattooing and the prison industrial complex.
So that's something I've been doing, ongoing interviewing around for, I guess, since 2019, and did a lot of when I was in school. I'm still doing some of it now and.
[22:46] Another thing that I think is nice about oral history, at least it nice for myself and the way that I've been working is that I don't feel as much pressure to produce a project with it. It's just not a very easily consumable type of media, for the most part, you know.
[23:06] Like we were saying at the top of this episode, it's not always about the flow or about the banter or about making it engaging for a listener, it's really about the narrative.
That can be incredibly long form. Not everyone wants to dig through archives to listen to three hours of one person talking about themselves.
There's so much that's there. It's very rich. It just demands a certain kind of attention, but it's not for the current way that we consume media, I think, which is like a short TikTok video, a short Twitter conversation.
And that's something that really drew me to it, right? That it had to, it required of me practicing, like a rigor and a patience and a presence that I don't get asked to do in my life otherwise.
You know, there's not always like a jazzy intro or like a commercial break to give your mind a pause.
And it can be really draining.
After doing an oral history interview, sometimes you're like, I have to go to bed because I just sat with deep presence with this person for three hours.
And now I'm so tired, this type of detailed listening, I just don't do very often.
And noticing those differences has been really cool.
It's been very cool.
[24:27] And yeah, oral history projects can look like so many things.
You can make a five minute audio compilation.
You can make a podcast, you can make a more abstract audio, you know, oral history sound piece, and you can make an interactive public display.
That's one of the cool things about it, that you have this material that you generate that can then be used in a number of different forms and formats. But...
Yeah, original oral histories can be quite long. As you know, just from our friendship and you telling me so much about oral history, I am now also obsessed with oral history and have decided to be an oral historian and love just learning more about it from you because I think, you know, something that's always been important to me as someone who lives, as like a queer person who lives rurally in small towns is like, I love getting to know my elders in the town and like the stories passed through generations and yeah, sometimes they're so beautiful to hear and then they feel like they evaporate a little bit into the air.
So yeah, I love thinking about capturing them and like, you can feel the texture of it.
Like when you, I think you said the word archives, like I'm like, ooh, I like picture going through like dusty folders and side of oral history.
[25:54] Can I tell you some of the things that make me really excited about oral history, please. So the first is that oral history tends to consider the interview as a unique historical event of its own, because you will not tell the the same story the same way more than once.
And that's shaped by the conditions under which you're telling it, who you're telling it to, what year it is, right?
If I ask you to do just a full oral history of your life, a life story five years ago, and we did it again today, they would be totally different.
And so there's something about capturing this really unique singular telling that is very exciting and very special.
[26:40] But oral history also considers memory quite differently than a lot of other academic fields.
And I don't know, I have a lot of reservations about calling myself an academic.
I don't know that what I would describe, the approach that I have is particularly academic.
But so much of how we try to make meaning of the world through research is through, you know, quantitative or qualitative data.
Data and oral history can often be left behind when they're trying to make these hard numbers or hard conclusions about human behavior and human thinking and or human psychology or experience because oral history is so driven by memory and and by individual meaning making.
And so, but oral history.
[27:27] At least in the ways that I was encountering it, really, we had a lot of conversations about.
[27:33] How that's all important information too, right? Like a misremembering or a contradictory.
[27:41] Memory where if you're like, well, I remember that that door was always closed and I say, well, I remember that that door was always open and that's how the dog got out that one day.
There's a lot of information there in those differing perspectives and differing remembrings.
And that to me is also really exciting because it generates the idea or it calls to mind the idea that collective memory and collective meaning making is really the way to get the.
[28:15] Most detailed tapestry of an event. That there is no singular voice that can objectively represent what something meant or how something happened and it, challenges, yeah, just the idea of like a singular objective historical record or retelling and the ways that power and dominant culture shapes how those things get committed to the history books or committed to our cultural memory. So it's, very thrilling to think about the fact that, sure, you could read one thing in a history book, but then you could talk to ten people that were there when it happened, and what huge distance there would be between those two ways of knowing something.
That is all so amazing, and my jaw like dropped when you said that it's a historical event in itself, which I just think is so cool. And then, I know this isn't technically, we're not doing an oral history project right now, but I did then think this is a moment in history.
[29:18] Right now. This is its own historical event, it's us recording the podcast. But that is so, thank you for sharing all of that. I just feel like it's a world that I think more people should know about and hear about, so thank you for sharing with us.
I would love to shift gears a little bit to talk about writing books, something that you've done, something that you're doing. And many people know you from the beautiful orange groundbreaking book, Could This Be Met, by doing his liberation work, which I honestly think is just relevant for anyone doing one-on-one work or even group work, but really just for those who are like in relationship, body to body with other people.
And I would love to hear.
[30:15] About the book coming to life process, especially around publishing. Did you work with a small publisher? Did you self-publish? I think many listeners of Common Shapes are interested in making books, and it feels just like a really overwhelming, mysterious process. So yeah, it's my hope that on the podcast we can sort of cut through some of the mystery. So I'd love to to hear about the making of the book and how it came to be.
Well, to give you a little bit of original context, I come from an independent publishing background.
Like I said, I went to school for printmaking. I just made zines.
And so everything was self-published, was really the default. You were like, I have something to say. I want to put it out. I'm just going to do it myself.
And the publishing world fell, and I would say still feels very far away from me too, as somebody who has published a book.
So I ran a publishing imprint for a little bit, a very indie, very DIY one called Discipline Press.
And we published books. I published books and scenes and pamphlets and all kinds of printed matter.
And that also, I mean, I was doing art book fairs.
[31:31] I wasn't, you know, really even selling at bookstores necessarily very much or feeling very involved in the publishing world. It was more that I had this deep investment in the material that I wanted to support being, accessible.
I mean, you can see it. I have this printing press tattoo. This is my printmaker tattoo that says, the tyrant's foe, the people's friend.
But that was so at the core of what I was so down for with independent publishing was just the dissemination of ideas, the democratization of access to those things, and just trying to find ways to put stuff out that I thought was really important, and a vehicle for me to ask questions of people, which is the groundwork for oral history, because I got to do all these interviews with people that I was publishing for and generating articles.
[32:21] But, guess I had not really written a book before at all, in any way.
And I decided that I had to because through that experience of training for this crisis hotline, I started to think really differently about what the tattoo exchange was doing for people.
Because I think largely through the rise of tattoo television, or the general attitude that I had encountered in tattoo shops that I had worked in, was that it's so annoying when people want to tell you their life story when you're tattooing them.
And it's so annoying when people want to tell you all the reasons that they're getting the tattoo, because you're just there to do the tattoo, and it doesn't really help you in doing your job.
And as I shifted into being a private, yeah, not a private studio artist necessarily, about more of an appointment only artist doing custom work for people.
The clientele that I was working with really shifted and I was tattooing pretty much only, you know, women, people of color, trans people, queer people, people who just had very different experiences of being in their bodies and moving through the world in the bodies that they inhabited.
And it changed the way that I saw a lot of those conventions about tattooing and how you interact with people socially or what rules you want to enforce about what people think a tattooed, because there was so much old school.
[33:44] Rule enforcement about things like oh, you can't get a neck tattoo if you don't already have Sleeves or a lot of other tattoos and I was like, I don't know It kind of feels like shit to tell like a trans person what they can and can't do with their body like I think that they have no illusions about what choices they're making and so that.
[34:03] Had me thinking very differently just about what I had inherited as tattoo wisdom or or guidelines or ways of practicing.
And after I did this training, I realized that the things that people would call into the hotline about were the same things that people would talk about in tattoo sessions oftentimes.
And maybe not to that same extent of being in crisis or needing to be hurled around something about, around a violence that they had experienced, but just about what happened to them as a person and what their experience in life was like and how tattooing touched those things.
And so I just realized that there was no resources around the emotional work that goes into tattooing.
It felt so inseparable from just doing the job and doing the craft and applying the thing.
And I felt like I had to synthesize all of these things that I was learning.
It felt very urgent, I guess I will say.
[34:59] I was like, I'm seeing all of these things in all of these different places that I'm a part of.
Other people aren't getting to see these.
It feels like it's my very urgent job to synthesize them, put them in one place and help people connect with these ideas that they might not otherwise connect with.
And that's how I started writing this book and it would just started with a million different post-it notes and chaotic outlines and rough drafts.
And I did not think that anyone would wanna read this book because it was maybe in 2018 or 2019 that I first started writing it.
[35:36] And these just weren't conversations that the tattoo industry was having at the time, at least not in a larger way or a cohesive way.
And I approached my friend who had a tattoo publishing imprint.
They made and make very gorgeous tattoo art publications.
[35:57] And he agreed to publish it. And we were like, I don't know, we could start with like a hundred copies because I seriously was like no one is gonna care about this at all and what happened between then and the book coming out into the world is that 2020 happened and so the pandemic happened that was really life-changing for tattoo artists, and then the George Floyd uprisings happened and it really just shifted the political landscape that the book then came out into. And I had started teaching a little bit of workshops I guess during the pandemic, like pretty early lockdown, because I felt like people needed.
[36:44] I just saw this kind of long distance or like long game need where I was like, okay, people really need a space to talk about how we're navigating these shifts, how to share information about how we're practicing tattooing safely through this pandemic now that we're reopening.
[36:59] How are the new costs of PPE, like changing the way that we do our businesses? Like what does it look like to hold space for people for whom we might be the first person that they've been in the same room with outside of their pod in months?
And yeah, so I started teaching workshops also a little bit.
I was teaching, I have taught over the last few years, like an intro to trauma-informed tattooing.
That was kind of the language and framework that was foundational to the book that I developed.
And that's language that I don't necessarily like to use at the forefront of the writing.
But my book was called, Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work.
And the second half of that is what I like to focus on most, the sort of like liberation work and how tattooing can touch on different political systems and be a type of intervention.
[37:52] I think what I've really seen this whole conversation is like the way that everything you do really does get woven together.
Like it feels so seamless. Like I really see the way that your tattoo work weaves into the oral history, weaves into the book, weaves into your activism work, weaves into your painting, your ceramics.
Like it all is this really beautiful, you know, as Lucchesa calls it, the web of all this work that you have.
And you're working on a lot. I know this as your friend.
I know this as someone who's very inspired by you.
[38:35] So, are you feeling overwhelmed? Are you feeling burnt out? You have a lot of plates in the air, sort of at all times.
Tell us a little bit how you tend to that part of you that maybe gets a little bit overwhelmed or when there's just a lot that you're turning your attention towards.
So much of that is being a freelancer, which is ultimately what I am.
Something I've always loved about your content and this, I guess this podcast specifically in what you've put out so far is the ways that you talk about the, just the details of that, the specifics of that because it is so nebulous and sometimes I see people who do so many different things and I'm like, that must be a rich person. Like how else could you sustain so many things when I can't quite even tell how you make money from them, which is part of why there's so many plates in the air all the time because when you freelance you don't always know when a paycheck is gonna come in or how long how many billable hours you're even logging until the project is done or if a painting is gonna sell or if you know a show is gonna return any of the money that you invested into putting into it. So that I think is the little, treadmill hamster wheel of capitalism moment of a lot of.
[40:03] The ways that I do the things that I do is because you kind of just got to keep the momentum going. And at least for me, trust that those returns will happen when they need to in ways that will keep it going. And at the moment, tattooing or I guess historically tattooing has paid for everything.
Tattooing has really been the glue that holds it all together because it's the most regular thing.
It's the most long-term career that I've had that's now the most reliable.
So I know I can, you know, work this many days and more or less make X amount of money that will cover my bills.
And then anything else is, there's a little more flexibility around, but that's changed a lot since I finished school.
And I'm trying to do things a little bit differently and bring my focus to certain new things, but that also can look like in one day, I work on tattoo designs for a film, and freelance articles for a book and oral history interviewing for another book that's coming out and being on a selection committee for a residency and trying to do my own paintings, and answering emails for all of those things.
So my days are really varied as a result, and I think that that's the thing I find myself.
[41:30] Coming up against most often is that when you say yes to the thing You don't always predict when the bulk of that work is gonna come back to bite you in the ass, Really cool. I said yes to this thing Abstractly down the line now, it's a month later and I'm doing four of these things all in the same week in a way that I didn't anticipate so trying to be, less stressed when those ebbs and flows happen.
It's very, it can be very feast or famine for freelance work, I think, where you want to say yes to everything because you don't want to miss any opportunities.
And then suddenly you have more work that you can handle and you're like, wait, this is supposed to be a good thing.
Why do I feel so stressed out? Why does this feel like too much?
Or sometimes why do I feel like I'm not bringing my best self to these things that I was so excited to say yes to?
So, I think these days I'm trying really hard, it's an ongoing practice, to even if I feel excited about the idea of doing something, to really check in with myself and say, when will I have to be putting in the most effort?
Is that something that's viable for me? Or can I say no and trust that maybe a similar opportunity will come back at a better time, And I can bring all of my energy and focus to it.
[42:49] Music.
[42:55] Something that inspires me so much about you is even when you have all these different projects happening and you're really busy with work, I always see you carving out time, for being a really active participant, in the movement work that happens right where you live.
I think that so often, especially in the digital age, as artists, we can get sort of overwhelmed with like, where should we be putting our attention?
Like, where should we put our time and energy? And I'm curious how you got involved in teaching in jails and prisons and the prison abolition work that you're so dedicated to.
And you mentioned working with the crisis hotline, how has that existed in your life?
Can you just tell us a little bit about like...
How do you find out about things that are happening? Where, how do you move towards them?
How do you move within them? And how does that show up in your day-to-day and in your life?
Well, I think the first thing that I have to say is that, that kind of political consciousness is something I've.
[44:07] Had around me since I was really young.
And I feel so grateful for that, especially in the last few years, because not everyone was able to have that.
And I just by virtue of being in punk was always around people who were politically involved, were doing organizing, were doing activism in a very DIY grassroots way where they weren't necessarily waiting for a chance to volunteer with a non-profit. They were like making food from donated groceries and doing food not bombs in the park or they were just showing up to protest.
[44:47] Because something happened, I needed a response.
And it's funny to think back and be like, I really, I think myself and the people around me really believe that we could do anything.
It was just so that the DIY community, where you're like, I can grow my own soybeans and make my own tofu from scratch, or I can brew my own beer, or I can build my own bike.
I'm really dating myself. this was really the time and place that I was involved in.
But there was something so formative about that for me to think, okay, how do we find the resources or how do we find a way to start that is already exists within us or is already nearby or is already a resource that maybe I don't have but somebody I know could have or a friend of a friend of a friend could have and how do we look to those networks?
How do we look to that community that can often be very hyper-local because the internet also just wasn't the thing that it was, that it is now, it wasn't that then. So...
[45:54] That was, it's taken a little bit of refinement and unlearning and discernment as I've gotten older to notice the things that I, I can't do. Maybe I could try to do them, but someone else is doing it better. Someone else has maybe been doing it longer or did it first or has built that and, and so I think that that's a balance I try to strike now is to bring my attention to something, to look around, try to tap into places that people are already doing it, try to be honest with myself about my own skills and capacity and resources that I have to bring to that table where it's like, okay, maybe I have less time than I wish that I had, but maybe I have more money to give than I thought I had.
Or sometimes it's the opposite that can really change.
But so much of what it comes down to for me these days is about interpersonal relationships.
[46:48] And so I would say that a lot of what I am involved in comes not from, I don't know, typing something into like a Google search bar and meeting somebody and them saying, oh, I do XYZ every Sunday, you should come by.
And me saying, great, that's actually in my neighborhood. That's so easy for me to do.
I would love to show up. Thank you for inviting me.
And yeah, I think that that's really the balance about making it sustainable for yourself, about recognizing the ways that things can be, some things can be more urgently needed in the moment. Some things are more long-term work.
How can we build our capacity for both of those? It's like, okay, somebody got arrested and we need money to bail them out. We need jail support. That's urgent. That's a short-term thing. This person likely is not getting arrested every single week. We don't have to do that long-term for this single individual but how can we then work on bail reform maybe or fundraising for bail funds so that everyone can be getting out when they need to get out.
So I think that that's what I try to bring my attention to it's funny. I I Wouldn't say that I describe myself as an activist or I wouldn't describe myself as an organizer. I.
[48:07] Really just think of myself as a person who?
Has this long? ingrained practice of scrutinizing power and That feels like it's my, work Sometimes I'm like, who am I? What am I doing? What does my art do? What does tattooing do?
What do any of these things even do? Especially in the face of very urgent conditions of rising fascism. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that just is where we are. And sometimes it's like, okay, what does making a painting do to make trans people safer? Maybe the answer is directly nothing. But how can I connect those things more directly? If I sell the painting, can I donate to relocation funds for people who live in states where they can't access trans-affirming care? And how can I plant those seeds both in, I think, an abstract way.
[49:03] Because I also wouldn't think of myself as a teacher, but I've seen firsthand the power of conversations, the power of interpersonal connection, and the power of exchanging knowledge and listening across difference, and had people come to me and say, you know what, I had never really thought about this before, but then I heard this thing that you said, and I thought about it differently, or I had never quite considered that this is something I should pay attention to, so thank you for bringing it to my attention. And like changing hearts and minds is not the full distance that we are trying to go. We have to change the material conditions, we have to change the material realities, and how do you make that leap? How do you bridge that gap? Do I have the answers? I don't think I do, but it feels like a multi-pronged project, and yeah, I think it has to be done in coalition with other people, but I think we're also responsible for our own work. There's a lot of responsibility, and I hope that people take those responsibility seriously. And I do believe in beauty. And I do believe in flowers. But I believe in flowers that intervene on political systems.
[50:25] A couple different times when you were talking that it's actually so much of what you just said answered the like, what's the point of it all? And I think that it's part of why I made this podcast and wanted to have guest episodes on the podcast, because, you know, it's definitely something I can experience is the like.
[50:47] Both in my mental wellness capacity and in my art capacity, just the like, what's the point of doing any of this?
And there was something about the way that you just explained all of that, that it reframed it for me, where sometimes I think I can be like, there's so much happening, I'm overwhelmed, where do I start?
And instead it's like, there's so much happening, like what a blessing to be an artist in this world and have so many entry points to take action.
And, you know, it's like, it's not necessarily a blessing so many bad things are happening.
I don't mean to say that, but like, there's just, there's so many places to start.
And that's a beautiful thing, because we all get to like have our different role in the garden of possibilities.
You know, it's like, you all need to start somewhere. I don't know, there was, that was just everything you said was so beautiful.
I also feel a lot of gratitude that my entire life started writing a monthly column for GR Screamer, the punk website, and when there was, yeah, we were not making TikToks.
[51:58] We were not making sub stacks yet.
You know, it was like, my column was called the art of, and was basically just an essay every week about me trying to figure out how to quit drinking.
And somebody else's was their favorite vegan recipes week. And, you know, I miss that sometimes. I think sometimes the world, the digital world has sort of pulled me from some of those roots. And I feel like I am always trying to sort of circle back.
Yeah. And I just want to say, everything I just said, very first draft, as I'm speaking, I'm thinking, but I love talking about these things with people. I love listening to other people about these things. That's something that I try to be to be really adamant about in spaces when I'm.
Writing or teaching or saying, just saying what I think to be like, I don't know, what do you think?
Because that's how we arrive at meaning together. That's how we arrive at meaning and action collectively. Yeah, I think that's a really important part of my own, teaching and writing and this podcast is I think right in the trailer in the first episode I was like a huge value to me is take what you like and leave the rest and that I don't have the answers.
Like you said, it's like part of answering these questions is asking more questions, and you do that so beautifully.
[53:21] I do want to ask, you started a Substack newsletter last year. We love to talk about newsletters here at Common Shapes. How does the newsletter as a channel of communication, as a form for holding your work and your thoughts. How has that felt to have sort of a writing channel to your audience and a place to express yourself creatively? Tell us a little bit about the newsletter in your world. I love newsletters. I know I'm in good company here. You are the person who encouraged me to finally make a newsletter after I took your make a newsletter class and I've been thinking about it for so long and kind of on the fence and you were like I you should just do it and I saw I did and I've been thinking about the newsletter so much there is so much I've been seeing and pinning that I want to bring to it and it feels a little larger.
Then I've been able to sit down and synthesize I was doing it doing it every week, which was a lot and now I'm think I'm finding the rhythm of how often I can actually do it and do it well, but I love the newsletter because I guess when I think about attention and consumption, Instagram and social media has sort of been at the center of how we scrutinize and how we think about those things right it was all about building a big following and.
[54:49] Somebody who started tattooing or was involved in art before Instagram was really a thing.
[54:59] I, that was a time when I think there was a very much an attitude of like all, all visibility is good visibility. That anytime anyone wanted to interview you or feature you or or what have you that you should just take the opportunity because it was all going to help you and be supportive. And as we've seen that is just not the case, right? The ways that we can be exposed to audiences beyond ourselves and beyond who we want to be reaching is just terrifying to me. It's very scary. And I've never wanted to be somebody that was trying to talk to everyone at once. I think that that dilutes your messaging and even now, the idea of an audience makes me self-censor in a way that maybe is good. You know, it makes me pause. It makes me really reread what I wrote a hundred times before I send it out. But it also can be stifling. It can be, really generate a lot of insecurity where you're like, what if this is misinterpreted? Or what if I didn't offer enough of a disclaimer to this thing? And the end result, I think of having a large Instagram audience is that I just felt like I was talking to everyone and no one at the same time. And so the substack has been great because.
[56:17] There is a little bit of a sense of talking to no one, but you know that everyone chose to be there and even though it's a smaller audience, people subscribed because they're showing up. They agreed to be there. It feels like a new round of invitations.
Right? It's like, okay, yeah, maybe you signed up to follow me when on Instagram, when I was mostly just doing tattoos. I don't really post that kind of stuff anymore. So maybe you don't really like being here anymore. And maybe that's okay. And it's nice to feel like I can regenerate or generate a new thing, a new space where I want people to show up for a different kind of content. And everyone knows transparently that that's why we're there together. And I love that it just shows up in your email inbox. I love when the newsletters I subscribe to just pop up in my email inbox.
It's such a nice little treat. And I love getting texts. I love getting person to person feedback.
A client comes in months later and is like, Oh, I really loved this one newsletter that you wrote about getting older and tattooing or about XYZ. I'm like, cool. I kind of forgot that I wrote that.
I really didn't think anyone read it. And this is really nice for it to come back around. And and now we can have an in-person conversation about what it brought up for you.
[57:35] And so I find the newsletter really fun. I like that I can be more responsive.
You know, with a book, you're trying to make something that's going to stand the test of time or at least be a document of a particular time and place and way of thinking.
The sub-stack is like, it can be really goofy one week, it can be a little more serious another week because there's more serious conditions to be responsive to.
I can make a sub-stack that's just things that I'm really excited about that I want everyone else to look at, too, and.
[58:03] That flexibility is really enjoyable. Yeah, I love Substack.
It's also helped me become more confident in calling myself a writer, which I never felt like I could do before, even though I had published a book.
I have had that experience on Substack as well, even publishing newsletters for a decade and having four books out, and writing since I was a child.
There was something about the container of Substack that I also felt like oh yes like I, am a writer that has has been helpful for me. Anything else you want to share with us that we didn't cover? Where can we find you on the internet? Yes so you can follow me on Instagram, at Tamara Santibanez and the Substack is just my name dot substack dot com. My website is also So just my name.com.
And I would say between those three things, you can get some information.
I've been so elusive and so bad about sharing the things that I'm doing, but maybe the newsletter is actually the best place now that I'm thinking about it, now that I'm saying it out loud.
[59:14] Yeah, do you feel comfortable marketing, period, question mark.
Do you feel like the newsletter is a place that feels a little more comfortable to share upcoming things more than Instagram these days? Like what's your relationship to marketing feeling like?
Yeah, I feel incredibly reluctant about it. Like one of my very old friends used to have as her Instagram bio, a list of things I can do for you.
And I always think about that because that sometimes feels like how we have to produce anything.
It's like, okay, is my newsletter a list of things I can do for you?
Is my website, a list of things I can do for you, is my presence online anywhere, just a list of things that I can do for you. And maybe that's why I feel resistant to it.
Maybe with how large the internet is, it feels really nice to just preserve something for literal word of mouth.
Like if I see you, I tell you about the thing.
[1:00:16] If you read my newsletter, you'll tell you about the thing.
So it is not a very effective marketing strategy, usually.
Yeah, but I think all I think what I run into is that those spaces just have such a short memory.
I come across so many people that are like, I did not even know that you wrote a book.
Or if I post about my book, they're like, congratulations, as if it's coming out for the first time.
It came out two years ago. So in some ways, I think it doesn't matter how much I talk about my book or don't because.
[1:00:49] There's always a person for whom it will be new. And it's fun for me to be places like this because I get to just talk about Thank you for watching.
[1:00:56] What makes me excited about things. And I'm bad at the part where I'm like and now you can check out my upcoming blah blah blah.
Yeah, I feel like I couldn't even tell you what my upcoming blah blah blah is at this moment. I can't even think of what It is or could be.
That's okay. Well, and I think that's why I tell people to have a newsletter, you know, even if they think they might send it out twice a year, you know, to just have somewhere so that when when you do get to be on someone else's podcast, or are in these spaces where you can, you know, quote, market yourself, that it can be a little more natural that you can just say, Yeah, subscribe to my newsletter. And when I have something exciting, I will tell you there.
One thing I will say, this actually does feel important to say, is that so much of the social media that we consume is shaped by these evil algorithms that are censoring us. And as we have so aptly learned from people doing sex work advocacy and organizing around things like like Sesta Pasta and just internet free speech.
[1:02:11] Political speech is punished online and that is so much of what my work revolves around and I'm not even being, I'm not even using explicit language, but if you post about something, say, like free Palestine, no one will see the things that you post for the next week until you share a picture of like yourself and your dog and you drawing a drawing.
And I think that is maybe the one thing I would say is if you like the things that somebody does to follow them in the way that makes it most easy for them to connect with you in most alignment with what their message is and what the thing that they do is because, yeah, if you want to follow someone who is a porn performer, you do need to follow them on Twitter or you do need to be on their email list.
List. And the same goes for a lot of organizers, a lot of social justice people, that Instagram is going to bury that content and you aren't going to get to see it even if you really want to see it.
So maybe just that, having some media literacy about how you are or are not being shown things, and if you really are invested in connecting with what someone is doing, I mean, finding the way that they can do that most freely.
That brings us to the end of our time together. Tamara, thank you again so much for being an amazing friend, an amazing artist, and such a fun guest to have here on Common Shapes.
Thank you, this was so fun. I loved our conversation.
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[1:03:45] Who's made this podcast possible. Our music is by Saltbreaker.
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