Andrew Roberts: Protean silicone matter

Various Others 2025: Guest Project by Andrew Roberts

Opening May 9th, 6 pm

As part of Various Others and the two part exhibition by Malte Zenses at Pequod Co. (Mexico City) and Sperling (Munich), we will also present a solo project by Mexican artist Andrew Roberts (b. 1995, Tijuana), invited by Pequod Co. His presentation, Protean Silicone Matter, is a three-channel video in which silicone—reimagined as a spectral, sentient entity—gains self-awareness.

By delving into the history of monsters and the materiality of horror, Roberts' work explores economic systems rooted in death, the weaponization of cultural artifacts, and the spectral entanglement between Mexico and the United States.

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Protean silicone matter, 2023 is a digital film in three channels where silicone, a spectral entity, becomes self-aware. Conscious about its material history and instrumentalization in the fabrication of images, it transmutes into the bodies in the screens, and then escapes to find its tangible form in the sculptures.

Considering that fictions generate reality and that Role-Playing Games grant tools to re-think and re-configure the present in a critical way, Roberts weaves a fable in sync with pre-human, fictitious forms of life. If our relationship with bodies of water has been historically mediated by fantastic otherness, is it possible to design a new tale?

The characters in Protean silicone matter —invoked via poems, digital animations, and sculptures— are suspended in a state of deep sleep where death and repose become indistinguishable from one another. As figures, they are marine creatures that dream about a non-human future. As artifacts, they are haunted matter.

Protean silicone matter confronts the spectator with two narratives that melt into each other. On the surface, a speculative fiction about the past of a certain multi-species engineering. Within it, a meta-modern analysis about its own condition as a method of production.

The pieces that comprise this assemblage are viscous and form changing. They assume their role as entities in a narrative play that employs science fiction’s capacity of imagining utopias and, at the same time, recognize themselves as auto-generative mechanisms of mutant matter.