Reality Residency: Gabriel Massan

Over the course of their online residency at Fact, Unbonded on a Bonded Domain, Gabriel Massan constructs a virtual environment developed around psychological experience and structural review.

In their rendering of psychological experience as the raw product for their work, digital artist Gabriel Massan takes hints from author and scholastic Saidiya Hartman’s idea of ‘critical fabulation,’ a practice of consistingof imaginary information togetherwith accurate product to fill in the blanks left in the archival and historic record of Black history. “I wear’t understand how lotsof digital sculptures I’ve made,” they confess, “but it all feels like archeological researchstudy.” Seeking to lineup their experiences growing up in Rio de Janeiro, coming of age in Sao Paulo and transferring to Europe, Massan excavates a virtual area in which to more carefully takealookat the political and cultural structures within which they are knotted, without having to usage their physical identity as a lens.

In this method, Massan’s practice of world structure can be comprehended, in Hartman’s terms, as “a method of identifying our time, thinking our present and imagining the past which hasactually developed it.” Over the 3 episodes of the artist’s online residency at Fact, Unbonded on a Bonded Domain, the artist checksout a virtual environment untethered both from their own identity and the physical and conceptual constraints of the human body, carryingout speculative situations to examine how queer club culture, systemic violence and virtual identities can aid us map out the product world and our relationships with it.

“I think it comes from an understanding that all of the things that my household and I went through in my life were part of a wave, or part of an community,” Massan states of their technique. “When I took my uniqueness out of this procedure, I might muchbetter comprehend how my identity, even however it clashed with that community, had another self, or another awareness, that was more associated to my sensations and my individual feelings, not just to my background.” By looking past the human, to entities shaped to fill in the blanks left in the disconnection of Massan’s experience with socio-political systems constructed without them in mind, the artist welcomes us to share in that experience, to contribute to the worlds they continue to develop.

Gabriel Massan Presents: Unbonded on a Bonded Domain (Part One)