Everyone’s journey is a unique inscription through time and isn’t a path that can be retraced or duplicated. How We Got Here is a series of concise recollections of personal journeys as told by talented creative individuals with different backgrounds, careers, and interests who share their struggles and motivations to explain how they reached this point in their lives.
For this edition of HWGH, we head over to London to catch up with Santiago “Santi” Abelaez, founder of creative studio and production house La Familia, which is based in London and Colombia.
Santiago Arbelaez
— 41, London —
Mark Renton, played by 24-year-old Ewan McGregor, leans over the toilet that he just emptied his bowels in, to fish out two heroin suppositories meant to be his last hit before going clean. He swirls one hand and then the other in the muck before taking a deep breath and diving in. Renton’s head, torso, legs and, finally, feet disappear into the toilet. Cut to Renton swimming in a dark blue body of water. He spots the drug capsules glowing on the rocky waterbed and grabs them triumphantly before emerging from the Worst Toilet in Scotland.
As a teenager, Danny Boyle’s 1996 film Trainspotting floored me. I was in awe of this work of masterful visual communication and, at that moment of time, I knew with perfect clarity that I wanted to study film.
At this time, my family was broke and we were living in conservative Colombia. I was bad at school, into punk, metal and skating, and hung out with a crowd of misfits. No one nurtured my creative abilities and everyone said that in order to get a job, I had to dress and behave a certain way. That moment I had of clear self-understanding and an articulated desire for self-expression became buried in the ensuing years as I had to do what I could to survive.
Fast forward five years, I’m in a toilet myself. Except this one is a pristine department store restroom before dawn—and it’s pristine because I’ve just finished cleaning it. I’m asleep sitting on the closed lid of a toilet.
“I was bad at school, into punk, metal and skating, and hung out with a crowd of misfits. No one nurtured my creative abilities and everyone said that in order to get a job, I had to dress and behave a certain way. That moment I had of clear self-understanding and an articulated desire for self-expression became buried in the ensuing years as I had to do what I could to survive.”
“All along I have had this vision of my younger self—this version of me that loved cult classic films, punk music, skating, and knew intuitively how to be myself—and I’ve gotten myself to a stage where I can embrace the things I love and support myself.”
