Fernando Sánchez Castillo’s oeuvre functions as a laboratory, a field for observation, for discovering and exploring interconnections, a place where the gaze can approach diverse images and subjects in an elliptical manner. It is a way of looking that, according to the artist, was unconsciously started by predecessors - artists and activists - in the construction of what we call ‘history’. At Art Rotterdam we show a work by Fernando that is borrowed from an iconic photo: Tomiko is a sculpture in white patinated bronze that refers to the story of ‘the girl with the white flag’ - a seven-year-old girl on the Japanese island of Okinawa who is separated from her family during the Second World War and has to survive on her own amidst the confusion and fiercest fighting of a war zone. She has nothing to fall back on except her wit and her courage. Her father had warned her to make herself invisible, and if she did emerge, she would do so with a white flag in her hand. She did so. She wrote about the horrors she went through in her memoirs. With his image, Sánchez Castillo pays tribute to the power of the individual.