Culture
OCT 2025
Funga is a living ecosystem, growing through collaboration, shared purpose and deep connection. Today, I want to celebrate one of our closest collaborators and friends, Santiago Sierra Soler – a filmmaker, artist and cosmic creative whose work reaches far beyond his many spectacular images.
In a recent conversation, Santiago shared his artist manifesto with Funga. As with most things he creates, I was deeply inspired. It felt like something beautiful and expansive to share here. It is a reflection of the spirit that moves through our community.
Santiago Sierra Soler ¨Self Portrait¨- shot by @valecollado
SANTIAGO SIERRA SOLER – Artist Manifesto
México, 2025
My work is born from three constant questions:
Why are we here?
Where do we come from?
Where are we going?
I believe art is a path for human evolution — a way to question the systems we have built and awaken a deeper awareness of who we are.
Three “isms” define me: Animism. Eroticism. Gnosticism.
Animism — everything is alive: animals, plants, rivers, mountains, even stones and the wind. All have spirit, and all are connected.
Eroticism — the power of desire and attraction; not only sexual, but the vital creative energy that pulls life together and animates everything alive.
Gnosticism — the path of hidden knowledge (gnosis); the idea that truth is not found outside, in dogma or systems, but inside — through direct experience, awakening, and inner knowing.
My process rises from the land of imagination.
To create is to play.
To create is ritual.
To create is to discover.
To create is to learn who we are.
The future speaks to me, and “I” bring it into the present.
I listen to my dreams.
I read the symbols that surface from the subconscious.
I follow their signals until they turn into form.
This journey has led me to the philosophies of the East — India, Japan, China, Polynesia — and to the roots of my own land: Mesoamerica, the tribes of the North.
Nature is my greatest teacher.
Travel, my mystical school.
I move through the world as a witness, called by places with magnetic force — each call a doorway, each journey a revelation.
I walk with Jung, Borges, Hermann Hesse, Castaneda, Tarkovsky, Jodorowsky, Toledo, Khalo, Salgado, Beard, Carrington…
I carry the Kybalion, the Upanishads, the Corpus Hermeticum, the Tao Te Ching, and the Mayan, Hopi, and Incan prophecies.
Everything is cyclical.
History repeats.
Life is an apprenticeship — an evolution of spirit.
I seek to learn, to listen to intuition at its highest, to give shape to my soul, to touch the invisible, and bring the hidden into the light.
What I want is to provoke awakening: to inspire, to expand the boundaries of what seems possible.
I create to discover myself through a constant process of spiritual alchemy.
In the end, my art is a bridge:
between humans and nature,
between the conscious and the invisible,
between the Nahual — the world of magic —
and the Tonal — the world of the real.
An invitation to remember who we are, in essence.
Remember to remember.
I am Santiago — the pilgrim, the seeker who walks paths seen and unseen.
I am Sierra — the mountain, rooted and eternal, rising between earth and sky.
I am Solar — the fire of the sun, the light of consciousness, the eternal spark.
My art is a pilgrimage, a mountain, a sun.
It is the bridge between dream and waking, between the Nahual and the Tonal, between the human and the divine.
I create to awaken, to illuminate, to remember.
I carry the fire forward — so that what is hidden may come into light.
👁️ 🔆 👁️
Directed by @santiagosierrasoler
Edited by @patatventino
Studio Manager @paulinavilar_
Music by @floatingpoints
