REBECA ROMERO: SYMBOLS OF RESILIENCE AND MEMORY
Copperfield presents Rebeca Romero's first solo show with the gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by a text written by Gisselle Girón Casas, curator at the ESCALA Collection.
Rebeca Romero’s exhibition After the Sun continues her exploration of speculative artefacts that merge Indigenous American technologies with contemporary fabrication techniques. Through fiction, she challenges the historical confinement of artefacts within museums, reimagining them in an alternate future where a revolutionary civilization thrives.
Drawing inspiration from Andean women who resisted colonial evangelization by fleeing to the highlands to preserve their culture, Romero poses a thought-provoking question: what if they had succeeded in establishing a matriarchy rooted in the worship of the sun and moon? In this imagined universe, The Sower emerges—a priestess-like figure depicted playing the Kawra, a ceremonial horn inspired by Mochica zoomorphic trumpets. Her image stands as a symbol of resilience and remembrance.
The exhibition’s material and conceptual framework revolves around stargazing, weaving, and sowing—viewed both as technologies and as metaphors for interwoven temporalities.
Mythic trumpets like Katari, Kawra, and Uturunku function as ritual instruments that amplify ancestral voices, while heraldic flags pay homage to plant and root life, emphasizing an ecological ethos. Through these symbols, After the Sun envisions women as timeless heroic figures, reclaiming sound and presence as acts of defiance against historical erasure.
In Gisselle Girón Casas´ words: “Through fiction, speculative storytelling devices, and myth-making, she urges us to rethink and re-establish our true relationship with the universe. After the Sun reminds us that there are still many stories to be told, seeds to be gathered, and songs to be sung. The eternal search does not end here - it begins anew.”
Rebeca Romero is an interdisciplinary artist born in Peru and based in London. Her practice spans sculpture, textiles, writing, sound, and performance, challenging dominant historical narratives of Indigenous and European cultural clashes. By merging Pre-Columbian iconography with advanced scanning and printing technologies, she recontextualizes historical data from online archives into new material forms, questioning representation, appropriation, and authorship. Her award-winning work Semilla SAGRADA was recently acquired by Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT. She has exhibited internationally, including at FACT Liverpool, Copperfield London, and V&A East, and has been featured in Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now and Sun Dreams: Art Mirages in Latin America.
After the Sun will be on display from March 20 until May 17, 2025, at6 Copperfield Street
London (United Kingdom).
