The Last Gundam is the first solo exhibition of artist Nicolas Romero (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1985) in Asia and represents the end of a cycle for Romero. One that began during the months of confinement experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the global pandemic caught him in an artistic residency in Barcelona. During that period the artist appealed to memory and to the record of his own consumption as a resource to rewrite the present and to manage to connect in an alien habitat. This series of works opened the door to create hybrids that bring us closer to near futures, fictitious images that could be part of a not so distant future, parallel to the collateral effects of the anthropocene.
"The gundams are an exercise of fusion of two times," Romero says of the show. "The first one has to do with my childhood in Argentina where anime and comics represented my transition between childhood and adulthood. But they also show the context of the 90's in Argentina with a globalized, privatized and imported economy where the objects I consumed came from all over the world. The construction of my identity grew to a certain extent, in parallel with the beginnings of the global consumer culture.
"Nowadays, I retake that childhood experience to represent my migration from Argentina to Spain. These contemplations are a way of seeing and recording the new world around me. Transmuting the products of my day a day life and representing my new identity in Gundams. The bodies of these are formed by objects that I have already consumed, that I desire or that do not belong to me. The need to compile my everyday life brings out defensive elements in the new space. Something similar happens with gundams when in anime series they appear as giants defending a geographical space.
"This exhibition is a compilation of resistance scenographies but also the description of a moment in the past, in order to imagine a long-term future. Through these mobiles suites made from my consumption, I invite the viewer to reflect on the relationship between past and present, identity and migration, as well as resistance and transformation in an infinitely globalized world."
The Last Gundam is on view at Ting Ting Art Space, Taipei, Taiwan
