Lately, news has proliferated about the detention of so-called illegal immigrants in the United States under the custody of ICE – the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. How many lives are fractured in this violent process?
Andrew Roberts encountered this reality at an early age. Like many people living along the Mexico–United States border, his father was detained while crossing the border. He was held in a detention center. The artist’s memories of visiting his father are somewhat ghostly – as a child, he didn’t fully understand where he was. This place of care was sterile and cold. It reminded him of a McDonald’s.
Andrew Roberts presents Haunted (2025), a video installation composed of metal tables and benches and 3D prints that recreates a fast-food restaurant near the U.S.–Mexico border wall. The space features four tables with four benches each, made of metallic gray aluminum with rounded corners, evoking both commercial franchises and prison cafeterias. On the tables, black rubber sculptures suggest disposable toys. They represent a hamburger, a newspaper, a computer, and a golf club. The room is white, but at times it is bathed entirely in red light.
At the front, a large rectangular projection, approximately three meters wide by two meters high, shows three spectral entities: a moving darkness, a mass of liquid rubber, and an intense red light. They move through corridors and bathrooms, transforming an everyday scene into a haunted environment. With each act, sound and color shift – from somber silence to red glow accompanied by noises and voices.
Around the space, trash bins and cleaning materials are covered with rubber reliefs, cabinets feature a costume of the Jack in the Box mascot, and an entrance is marked by double glass doors with a lightbox in red and white, the brand’s colors. The mascot is a commercial character from an American fast-food chain: a doll with a round white head, blue eyes, and a fixed smile, always dressed in a suit and yellow conical hat, portrayed in campaigns as a cheerful executive. In the 2000s, the chain distributed miniature versions of this character in various professions – police officer, firefighter, doctor – in kids’ meal sets. Roberts recontextualizes these objects critically, turning promises of progress into specters.
Between fast food, incarceration, and spiritual séances, Roberts proposes what he calls “spectral realism”: giving form to the social and historical forces that traverse us, showing how terror infiltrates ordinary life.
A digital work by the artist, temporarily located during the exhibition at the Tijuana–San Diego border and also within the Ibirapuera Park, can also be accessed through the Apparitions program via the WAVA app, expanding the exhibition’s boundaries beyond Parque Ibirapuera and the Bienal Pavilion.