REBECA ROMERO

After the Sun
Rebeca Romero

“Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.”

Ursula K. Le Guin in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986

After the Sun presents Rebeca Romero’s ongoing exploration of speculative artefacts that merge Indigenous American technologies with contemporary fabrication techniques. By removing and disavowing artefacts from the confines of history and museums and rekindling them in fiction, Rebeca constructs an alternative future where a fictional revolutionary civilisation thrives.

To construct the myth of After the Sun, Rebeca draws on the story of Andean women who resisted colonial evangelisation. They escaped to the highlands, forging their ideology and developing methods to protect their culture, philosophy, and origin stories. Rebeca asks: what if these women had succeeded in establishing a new matriarchy, a powerful reclamation of the worship of the sun and moon?

Rebeca introduces us to theSower, a feminised entity depicted playing Kawra, a ceremonial horn inspired by the zoomorphic trumpets of the Mochica civilisation in what is now Northern Peru. She embodies a high priestess who studies celestial movements to guide agricultural rituals, reinforcing a culture of care and kinship with nature. She emerges as a heroic figure, immortalised and resisting neglect, taking the shape of a reconstructed wall relief.

The exhibition’s material and conceptual foundation revolves around stargazing, weaving, and sowing, as technologies and as metaphors for interwoven temporalities and the potential to rekindle our relationship with the earth. Spindle whorls, ubiquitous in archaeological collections, take on new meaning in Gathering, where they link seven mirrored stainless-steel stars in a structure reminiscent of rosary beads. The work references the Seven Sisters, a star cluster central to myths of celestial transformation.

Musical technologies further enrich the exhibition’s speculative world-building. The mythic trumpets Katari, Kawra, and Uturunku function both as ritual instruments and as amplifiers of ancestral voices. The Sower immortalised playing her trustworthy Kawra, reclaims sound as an act of defiance against historical erasure. Meanwhile, heraldic flags honour plant and root life, emphasising an ethos of ecological harmony. Gathering and the Sower assert that these women as timeless heroic figures.

In an era where capitalist and colonial structures increasingly monopolise utopia, Rebeca’s speculative artefacts offer an urgent counter-narrative, a vision of resistance, resilience, and the enduring power of myth. The exhibition embodies a heartfelt collective urgency for science fiction novels of resistance strategies, and alternative ways to live and embrace life.

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.

Gisselle Girón Casas

A downloadable longer essay about After the Sun is available here