Ressurection Lands
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
2020
Resurrection Lands (2020) is an online game by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley that explores the effects of “trans tourism.” Brathwaite-Shirley refers to “trans tourism”as the voyeuristic and inappropriate use of the representation of (black) trans people. The artist criticizes that the inappropriate treatment results in the exploitation of painful and traumatic experiences. In contrast, Brathwaite-Shirley is concerned with how to protect those most at risk of being erased from history: “We have discovered the technology to scan the earth and digitally bring back the memories of the buried black trans ancestors. These memories are made comprehensible and sentient within the archive. As the archive became more and more popular it also began to be misused and mistreated. After a while it is now possible to access the archive solely through an esports tournament (1). You participate in this tournament to enter the archive. Which team will you pick?”
(1) An esports tournament is the sports competition by means of computer games. Generally, the competition is held in the multiplayer mode of a game between different people.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (lives in London) is a non disciplinary, non-binary artist working predominantly in animation, sound, performance and video games to communicate the experiences of being a black trans person. The artistic practice focuses on recording the lives of black trans people, intertwining lived experience, fiction and interactivity to create work that refuses to let viewers be passive. The works are often seen as a form of autonomous archiving in which the experience shifts and moulds based on the identity of the user as well as the choices they make during the experiences.
