Andrew Roberts’s Cadáver fantasma [Spectral corpse] unfolds like a LAN party hosted by the dead—a para-digital séance where adolescent zombies rehearse the unfinished business of a generation raised on late-capitalist debris and border-zone dread.

Entering the installation feels less like walking into a museum and more like infiltrating a bunker assembled from discarded RPG terrains, half-rendered memories, and the emotional residue of 2006 Tijuana: the year the fantasy collapsed and the violence became infrastructural.

Roberts has long mined the architectures of gaming for their ideological bleed-through—those inherited templates of “heroism,” monstrosity, and damage baked into the engines we use to simulate our desires. He treats 3D modeling as both tool and trap, a way to “hack their technologies,” as he puts it, exposing the soft underbelly of digital myth-making. Here, the undead teenagers speak in the lingua franca of MMORPGs, anime forums, and after-school console rituals. Their testimonies oscillate between shitposting and prophecy, stitching pop-cultural detritus to the socio-political accelerations of the U.S.–Mexico border. They appear as avatars rendered in necrotic neon, recalling the artist’s aim to explore “mortal programming in the digital world, as well as its repercussions on our flesh-and-blood bodies.”

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The installation’s sculptural perimeter—backpacks perched on office chairs, resin heads slumped like discarded NPCs—evokes a classroom after an evacuation, or perhaps a LAN café abandoned mid-raid. The tabletop dungeon, populated by transparent figurines frozen mid-quest, functions as a mausoleum for suspended adolescence. It’s not nostalgia; it’s an autopsy. Roberts treats youth culture as a speculative ruin, a terrain map built on “economic systems constructed on death,” where fantasy becomes less escapist than diagnostic.

On screen, skeletons dance with a manic, glitch-inflected joy—an obscene cheerfulness that feels eerily truthful to a generation forced to metabolize catastrophe as entertainment. Roberts isn't illustrating violence; he’s diagramming its ambient bandwidth, its capacity to code the psyche long after the body has adapted.

Cadáver fantasma positions the zombie not as monster but as witness: a spectral archivist of a moment when geopolitical and emotional infrastructures converged into something undead, something communal, something still unresolved. Roberts’s world is not a fiction layered atop reality; it is the hidden rendering engine of our present—finally brought into view.