REBECA ROMERO

'Cosmotechnics', 2024

Atractor Studio + Semantica, Patricia Domínguez and Rebeca Romero challenge the idea that technology is the same everywhere and across all cultures. They draw inspiration from plant life to reimagine technology as evolving and ever-changing, reflecting and respecting our diverse societies, ecologies and cultures.

In the exhibition, technology transforms into an ally for resilience, resistance, and growth, whereby the concept of 'cosmotechnics' is put into practice. This term was coined by the Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui, where ‘cosmos’ refers to locality and ‘techne’ to technological creations. Hui argues that technology’s true potential lies in its alignment with local cosmologies —spiritual, ecological, and cultural understandings of the world.

Rebeca Romero presents a newly commissioned installation for Cosmotechnics. Born in Peru and based in London, her work blends pre-Columbian iconography with modern technology to ask how new technologies can revive ancient belief systems erased from history. In Rebeca’s futuristic sculpture, Chrysalis (2024), she combines ancient wisdom with video mapping, 3D scanning and printing to form a speculative allyship between plants and humans. 

Evoking a sacred totem, Chrysalis is a speculative future-ancient device. Shifting our attention to the magic and the power that reside in plant-life it takes the shape of a reimagined entheogenic flower in bloom. The man-sized sculpture is activated through the movement of the visitors in the space triggering a projected animation, a vision that simulates the activation of the magic dormant in the artefact.

Its scale, suggest that it was built to gather people around it, its expanding body connected to the earth, reaching towards the sky could be a invitation to our own mental expansion, our transformation.

After all at its root, working with entheogenic plants as a spiritual practice was and is all about connection: to the Earth, to each other, to the cosmos, and to our truest selves.