Interview by Lyndsey Walsh
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is not here to make art for passive consumption. Based and living in Berlin, Brathwaite-Shirley uses the audience as a primary medium of creative exploration, whereby entering the gallery, you become responsible for the way the work takes shape and envelopes everyone around you.
While it is easy to be drawn in by the aesthetics of video games that are heavily embedded in Brathwaite-Shirley’s work, the enticing and colourful interactive installations offer no easy mode or auto-pilot to experience. Instead, the audience must reckon with how their decision-making as players exposes their potential biases as they navigate Brathwaite-Shirley’s virtual worlds. Braithwaite-Shirley’s first major solo exhibition in Berlin, THE SOUL STATION, debuts a newly commissioned work for the LAS Art Foundation alongside an “Arcade” surveying her earlier works and games.
THE SOUL STATION, curated by LAS senior curator Boris Magrini and guest curator and researcher Mawena Yehouessi, fills Berghain’s Halle with over ten hours of gameplay, which will evolve in its second episode ARE YOU SOULLESS, TOO? that is set to debut during Berlin Art Week. In the first episode, YOU CAN’T HIDE ANYTHING, takes centre stage as a multiplayer experience where participants can move through a parallel society to our own where the world has been engulfed in a revolution that has been waged against globalised slavery and the enslavers have been overthrown. The stakes are at an all-time high as the work tasks the audience to work together to find a group of distinct characters within the game and attempt to save them from their own disparate fates and potential demise, while also sharing in these character’s final moments, dialogue, and thoughts.
YOU CAN’T HIDE ANYTHING expands on Brathwaite-Shirley’s interactive approach of using the audience as a medium while preserving and archiving the stories and voices of the Black Trans community. Brathwaite-Shirley debuted her work RESURRECTION LANDS in 2019 and BLACK TRANS ARCHIVE in 2020, which both seek to navigate ways of engaging and preserving histories, memories, and voices of the Black Trans community and Black Trans ancestors by giving them a digital, expansive, and imaginative archive in which they can inhabit and live on.
However, Brathwaite-Shirley’s audience has never been positioned as having a neutral gaze within these works. Facilitated by the role of choice and facets of self-identification, the audience determines how these archives, games, and artworks exist in the gallery or within the confines of an online browser, which allows these experiences to unfold anywhere, even at home. As the audience often becomes what is known in game studies as a “performing player”, whereby their gaming is put on display for others to watch, all players must reckon with the outcomes of their own decisions and the ways in which their own and individual identities can inform their decision-making processes.
Brathwaite-Shirley’s 2022 work SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE is a prime example of this. The work examines how our decisions are inextricably entangled with issues that remain at the forefront of social discourse. Framed as a point-and-shoot game, participants are tasked with distinguishing between allies and threats in pursuit of saving vulnerable individuals in need of collective protection. However, this kind of discernment is not easy to carry out, much in the same way it is often difficult to distinguish between good and bad in our own lives. Other visitors to the exhibition can watch on as a singular player attempts to navigate the challenging landscape of choice and the consequences that follow any action of violence.
There are no right or wrong answers to be found in Brathwaite-Shirley’s expanding body of work. Instead, these games, archives, and narratives call out the importance and a greater need for reflection on our own individual and societal beliefs, experiences, and modes of being that very much shape and impact the world around us.
Danielle, to give our readers insight into your background and practice, your art brings entire worlds to life, but these worlds also tend to emerge from histories and archives that may be unknown to some or have not yet been heard. What has been your big bang moment that has jumpstarted this multiverse of worlding in your practice and share with us some insights about the primordial matter and energy that you find yourself being fueled by?
I think the Big Bang moment was when I found the picture of Mary Jones from 1836, but it’s essentially this poster of this black trans woman, and they called her the man-monster. That was the moment when I started looking into how black trans people had been archived in the past and realised that it was just really bad. I think there was some court stuff when black trans people were arrested; there was like porn, and then maybe from the 1980s, a bit more stuff, and a little bit earlier in the 1970s. But nothing really went back that far that was archived by us. And so, for me, that was a real jumping-off point where I said, okay, I need to start making archives or at least start trying to record the black trans people around me. And that’s the first thing that came to mind was, okay, let’s make an archive.
That’s when the first game, Black Trans Archive, was made. For me, that was the jumping-off point, and that’s how we did it. We had never done an archive before, and I was trying to figure this out with the group of people we were working with: How? What are the steps we need to take? And is it important that we focus on the usual questions that you get asked, like, “Oh, are you trans? How long have you been trans for?” which is what was kind of being recorded at the time? It was like 2019. Instead, we focused on how the people and the community thought about their dreams and the worlds they imagined.
And that’s when we, as a universe, started getting pulled out, where you would speak to someone and then pull out an entire section, world, and city just from a small story that they would tell you. So, it would go from the design of a character to a city to essentially a little universe. And that’s kind of been the genesis of all work since that point.
My introduction to your work was through the Black Trans Archive, which I discovered during the COVID lockdown in 2020 and then immediately fell in love with your practice. In the work, I became so enthralled by how you use the mechanisms of horror as a medium of defining, mediating, and shaping access, which is such an important topic when we think of not only constructing in digital spaces but also in physical ones as well. Can you tell us more about how you approach storytelling, archiving, and access in the process of creating your work?
Okay, let’s start with the storytelling. So, the approach to storytelling is usually very nonlinear. And there are a few different approaches. I wish there was one, but there’s not. Sometimes, I work with no one, which is fine; sometimes, I work with amazing people. And so if we’re ever working with someone, they are the first focal point of the story. It doesn’t even matter what I’m interested in. The first thing that has to come is a genuine conversation.
From there, I write a script based on what they say so that they may talk to me about anything. It doesn’t even matter. We just have a conversation. I remember at the beginning of this game [The Soul Station], I was speaking to one of my friends. They were talking to me about being married to a trans woman and that trans woman transitioning in their relationship, which began this whole arc of these characters that I made, these two lovers, that are finding it difficult that one is transitioning. One loves them and thinks it’s another way to transition. And they’re having these conversations that are hard to have but need to be had anyway because they’re together now. And so, usually, that’s how the storytelling begins in a very nonlinear fashion.
And if you think of it like planets, each person is a planet. And then my job as a director is just to link the planets. You start linking them by some reference, which, let’s think of as a spaceship. That is the reference, and it flies to another planet and another planet so that you can get pulled along, even though they’re very disparate in some ways. But also, something I was interested in, and still am, is the person playing. Because it’s so interesting that often, in art, who you are is irrelevant. The art often says I’m doing all the work and everything for you.
It is really important that not just who you are, who you identify as, and how you’ve been living your life but also the choices that you make affect the entire artwork that you see. You can miss 90% of it because of just who you were being, who you were born as because that’s literally what life is like. Having that at work is really important because it makes you realise that you’re not seeing other things. If you’re missing that in a piece of art, what are you missing in real life if you’re just not able to see this section of the world or if you don’t interact with a Black trans person?
And the work is just a trick. It’s one big trick to ask you questions about yourself. We spend so much time on the visuals is to get you to relax so that we can ask you a question like, should you traumatise yourself for your partner? Or are some bodies more inherently dangerous when you’re least expecting it? Yes, so that’s access.
The Soul Station builds upon your use of audience-as-medium in your work, and you are inviting visitors to contend with their own experiences, choices, and biases. This often creates an intimate experience with an audience, as they have an active role in shaping the outcome of the artwork. How have you found that the ways in which you approach interaction in your work have shifted from your earlier works until now?
Yeah, I think in the earlier works, the interaction was a lot more basic. So essentially, it was based on these 90s games that were called FMV games. The full-motion video games were essentially trying to combine Hollywood and games, and they completely flopped. But I really love those games. I grew up playing one called Rebel Assault 2, which was a Star Wars one.
The interaction in the initial games was super basic. You press 123 to pick a video, essentially, and then it will play a video while you sit there. So, even though it was interactive, it was also laid-back. Then I did Resurrection Lands, which is very similar. But then I did She Keeps Me Damn Alive, which was the gun game and is a lot more interactive, where you literally can’t sit back. If you sit back, you fail. You have to shoot at all times, and you’re asked to shoot to protect black trans people. But everyone looks like a monster, so inevitably, you will fail. So, it’s about paying attention, but it was because when you use weapons to protect people, you usually can end up harming someone that you mean to protect.
Slowly but surely, the controllers have gotten more expansive, and the options have also increased. I made this game called The Lack last year, which is a game you play on these massive dance pads, and you physically cannot play alone because each dance pad is like one metre by one metre. You have to play with a group, so the interaction has become much more communal. Every game now depends upon a community coming together in a moment, and the experience gets better when people start playing together and gets worse when they start playing alone, just like in real life.
The ways in which public and private gameplay shift notions of embodiment and narrative in games radically shifted with the rise of the arcade economy, bringing about the notion of performing players, which has also translated over into the digital world of streaming. While many of your works have playable interfaces that audiences can interact with online in private if they wish to, such as BlackTransSea, how do you think the spatial context of public exhibition or public play changes the ways in which you think about how you work with the audience as a medium?
The main thing about the public one is that you can affect how they move. So, it’s not just about how they play the game. Usually, there’s someone who sits in the centre, and everyone’s watching them. There’s an intenseness to the playing. There’s a pressure that mounts up when you’re in the actual shows, and you are making the show for everyone else. You’re responsible for what everyone sees.
If you do a bad job, everyone looks at you as if you did a bad job. So, it puts the onus on the audience to begin making the work, and a key point is that I’m tired of people not doing anything. And it feels like, at least in this show [The Soul Station], you have to do something to make anything enjoyable. If you do nothing, nothing is interesting. So, you have to have a conversation with the work and a negotiation. And sometimes the work is challenging to negotiate with, and you need other people to help you negotiate it. That is what’s different to what’s at home because home is a very private, intimate experience. You’re by yourself, you’re thinking about yourself, you’re taking your time.
But you can only take your time in the shows, and it feels hard even to go up and press a button. A lot of people come and sit on the side, press a button, and then run back to where they think it’s safe. That’s the whole dynamic I am trying to get with everyone. I am trying to make it almost impossible not to interact and not to be passive because I hate passive shows, especially if they’re my own. I feel like we have so much beautiful art that we can look at and just consume. We need some art that makes you do things and makes you take some responsibility for what’s happening around you rather than just bathing in something that someone has worked so hard over.
Two recurring themes and questions throughout your works deal with notions of accountability and knowability about the impact of our actions. One of the things I love most about your works is that there are no correct answers or choices someone can make to “win” or guarantee the best outcome. Since starting these works and seeing how people interact with them, have your perspectives on these themes shifted?
In the older works, I made more pathways that seemed like doom pathways. For example, in Black Trans Archive, there are lots of times you just kick out, which I think worked for that archive because the concept was to keep the archive safe, to imagine the people living within it.
Now, I want people to make that decision for themselves, rather than me making it because I was finding that the work, at a certain point, became a bit too much of “you’re this, I’m this, you’re this, I’m this”. Instead, I want the audience to say, “I’m this because of what I did”. And I learned that from She Keeps Me Damn Alive. When someone shot someone, and that person said, “Why did you shoot me?” and then they just froze. They didn’t do anything else for, I think, five minutes.
Then, they came up to me afterwards and said, “I did it completely wrong. I did it wrong.” I was like, “Oh, there’s no wrong way to do it. That’s interesting.” That’s when that whole arc began, and I realised that people can judge themselves. I don’t need to do that. It’s more effective if you do because that’s where the change might happen. So, in January, I made The Rebirthing Room in Studio Voltaire, and that game was about therapy. You could pick six different options that you need to get over, like anxiety, addiction, and things like this. Then, you would have to go through and fight to get over those, and addiction was the hardest pathway because addiction is tough to get over.
I’m on this train of trying to get people to self-assess whether they’re good or bad people or need to change in any way. I am less on board with saying you’re a terrible person or something like this because it’s less effective. I know it’s lofty, and I don’t think I’m close to this. But the art space can be more than just looking at art. They [the audience] may leave with at least a tiny reflection on something, which might turn into one small change. I want to find a way to make someone change when they leave the show, for themselves, for the better, even if that’s not for the better for me. It might be for the better for themselves. That’s what we’re trying to get towards. One day in the far future, I will achieve it and then become a licensed therapist.
Your works also invite many collaborators, not only through your archiving process but also by incorporating performances and embedded identities within the games themselves. Can you share with us a bit more about how you consider collaboration to exist within the context of your practice?
Yeah, it’s the main reason everything exists. Every character and every room is based on an actual person. So, talking about The Soul Station or the main game, You Can’t Hide Anything, every character is based on an actual conversation I have had, for example, a discussion with Ebun Sodipo about the UK changing their rules on transitioning and making it harder to transition if you’re younger and in general. The waiting times are long, but only certain medical lines are approved. We discussed what would happen if a government was pro-trans but only pro-trans in one way. I think in Iran, you can be trans, but you have to do a complete transition.
That’s bad for me because there’s no nuance in identity there. It’s just: “If you’re trans, you must be this”. I feel like; personally, that’s also really bad because you should be able to have whatever you want within the range of what that is. Then, The Preacher was based on a conversation around faith. Because a lot of queer people don’t have a faith, per se, but they do have a lot of spiritualism. I had a conversation about some of the negative and positive effects of certain sects of queer spiritualism. Some of them were very cult-like, as I knew them, and some of them were great. I just like all kinds of spiritual and religious stuff.
All the other characters were based on different conversations based on that. Essentially, there are different kinds of conversations from different people. Once I had those conversations, I built the characters, the world, and the environment just around those things. So, for me, collaboration is the be-all and end-all of everything. If I had no collaborators, there would be no point in making any work. There would be no one archived, there would be no one recorded, and there would be no point.
Also, everyone who did the voice acting is queer and are excellent performers. We have Madison Moore, we have Blu Bone, Newroz Celik, Ebun Sodipo, Jayden Rahatoka, and Robin Rutenberg. They are all amazing artists, performers, and writers within the queerness themselves. And it’s essential to archive them just in general. So, it is an honour even to have some contact with them, and that’s usually how it works. It’s just that these people are my peers, and it feels ridiculous not to try in some way to record a part of their life, even if it’s just their voice. Collaboration is the central aspect of everything. Every single work has people from my community in it.
An overarching antagonist in your works seems to be not an actual character but the act of forgetting, both in sort of this fallacy of memory and the inequitable ways collective memory values and stores information. How do you approach memory and remembering within the context of your creative practice, and how do you navigate composing truths and personal histories with storytelling?
So, I have a rule in the games when we’re making them. Usually, I try to model things quickly, but now I’ve also decided that it can no longer be a subtractive process. The process always has to be additive. Because you’re right, there is a theme of “burying,” which I would call burying, and I hate it. Even so, if I did a model of you, for example, if it was wrong, and I felt like it didn’t represent your essence, like your soul, I can’t take anything out. I have to add something. So, then I would say, maybe it’s the eyes, and I’d have to add another set of eyes on top of your eyes. Then I had extra earrings, or I’d have to add wings or something. It has to be an additive process; you can’t bury any part of you.
That permeates the entire practice, where I’m really scared of recreating the problem that the archives did—of essentially working with someone and then burying a part of them that was more honest than I realised. So, I don’t want anyone to be forgotten in a project or buried within the process.
That’s usually why when I have people’s voices, those just go in raw. Many things are scrappy, glitchy, weird, poorly recorded, and cheap. It’s all about trying to get to that honest essence rather than this glossiness because sometimes, when you have a super glossy finished project, someone’s soul gets lost a little bit. And I know I don’t believe in souls, and I talk about it a lot. The main essence is trying to get that soul in, even if it’s held together by duct tape and glue. That’s the thing that’s real– that you get the emotions of– rather than having an amazing one-to-one representation of someone that doesn’t mean anything to me. A photograph doesn’t have someone’s soul, but the story around it may be.
What’s your chief enemy of creativity?
For me, the chief enemy of creativity is usually the politics surrounding making work or not even making it. When you’re making it, it’s fine. But showcasing the work, contracts, emails, and things like this take a lot of time, and I still do most of it by myself.
And that is currently the biggest enemy of creativity. Because other than that, I can work. I work thirteen hours a day, happily always, and I don’t socialise. So, that’s the only thing that’s the enemy of creativity– that and finance, like, literally financial organisation.
You couldn’t live without….
There are so many answers here. Okay, I’m going to give a gaming answer, and then I’ll give a wishy-washy answer. The gaming answer is UPBGE, which is a blender game engine that no one uses. I prototype every single thing I ever make on it. That’s an amazing game engine.
But yeah, I couldn’t live without my chosen family. It’s not a materialistic thing. They are the ones. I would say community, but I really mean my chosen family. The ones who are always there for you and constantly in your ear, even when you don’t phone them and they phone you and say, “Where the hell have you been?” I cannot live without those people because they keep me on track.
