In his artistic practice, Andrew Roberts works with the materiality of horror, and it is multidisciplinary: as research-based as it is poetic, and as close to the world-building of videogames as it is to the tactile realm of sculpture. His ideas of horror are influenced as much by the Hollywood and videogame industrial complexes, as they are by the vernacular and gore-ish narratives of violence in Northern Mexico written in the 20th century by Nelly Campobello, and the strange fictionalization of larger-than-life, nation-wide conflicts in the works of Fernanda Melchor and Mariana Enríquez. As the philosopher Eugene Thacker has explained, “demons” require a “strange intimacy” that stays with us, that crams the signal with noise: the anti-mediation of hyper-communication, that confuses reality, mixing the natural with the supernatural in our perception of the world.

For Roberts, this coalesces into what he calls “spectral realism,” a keen interest in the aspects of horror that lie beyond the structured logic of human rationality. In that sense, his piece is about extra-human substances, or materialities, whose behavior exceeds those very thresholds. In the video, we see three spectral entities, not quite ghosts, that feel pulled to manifest themselves at a fast food location on an equally violent and quotidian border. A burger-smelling and convenient meeting point, where divided families, cross-border workers, and students find each other. The fluctuating appearance of these specters evinces their ungovernability, their intermingling-agency: how they haunt as much as they are haunted. One of the entities embodies a deep darkness, lurking and shifting, coming and going – becoming a clear visual boundary between what is known and what is unknown. Another one is rubber, the stuff of toys, a third cousin of plastic and oil, elastic and resilient, preternaturally malleable and born for disposable representation; the last one personifies that familiar yet alarming, terror-friendly red light, as common to big, obvious advertising as it is to the big, obvious hints that bloodshed is on its way, as coded in sleek, contemporary horror f ilms. The enclosure for this video simulates the fixed and basic furniture of franchised restaurants, but it also alludes to carceral furnishings, reminding us of that other type of violence that prevails in border zones. Its rounded corners also wink to the modern-era spirit séances, where the death would be contacted, mediated; and in that sense it also conjures the ghosts of art’s minimalist past.