Contemporânea

The world and its constituents are never, and have never been, finalised^[1]

THE MANUAL IS MISSING

YOU WILL HAVE TO MAKE YOUR OWN RULES

DONT TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS

TRUST THE VOICES OF OTHERS

THEY MAY BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOURS

These are the words that appear on my screen when I try to access the video game-like artwork I CAN'T FOLLOW YOU ANYMORE by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley on blacktransrevolution.com.

The game begins with a question:

WOULD YOU BE A GOOD LEADER FOR THE REVOLUTION?

YES / NO

Would I? Would you?
I don't know the answer, nor what it might trigger next—but I have to decide. Without a decision, I can't continue.

This tension between decision and uncertain consequences is ever-present in Danielle's work. The artist and archivist creates playable artworks that depend on the agency of her audience. Danielle's work demands something from you.

YOU WILL LEAD A NEW REVOLUTION

YOU MUST DECIDE WHAT YOU WILL FIGHT FOR.

In I CAN'T FOLLOW YOU ANYMORE, the playable character is a Black transgender god who returns to lead a revolution. But not all of Danielle's works offer the audience the opportunity to slip into somebody else's role.
When I, as a white cis author, visit the website blacktransarchive.com, I don't play a character—I enter the archive in the first person. The instructions at the beginning are clear: THIS IS A PRO BLACK TRANS SPACE—THIS PLACE WAS MADE FOR US.

Followed by a question:

HOW DO YOU IDENTIFY?

1 I IDENTIFY AS BLACK AND TRANS 2 I IDENTIFY AS TRANS 3 I IDENTIFY AS CIS

Depending on your answer, your experience in the archival gameworld will change. Danielle doesn't exclude anyone, but makes it clear: this is a space that responds to you as a person—just as the world we live in does. However, Danielle's worlds are built on the lives of Black transgender people and insist on the necessary perspectival shifts. Her narratives do not simplify or flatten identities to please anyone, especially not the white cis norm—a construct posing as default.

The artist has said that her games are deliberately unkind to her audience, or at least she doesn't make it easy for them. In a conversation at Art Basel in 2024, she noted:

The reason I am using game engines is because you can answer a question in a game engine that is really hard to answer. … Games can offer a chance for you to choose a choice that actually makes you have a lump in your throat and get scared about the repercussions that you are going to see later. Especially if you are in an environment where everyone is watching you.^[2] 

The tension rises in an exhibition space. Unlike in the privacy of a laptop screen, where I can play a game once, twice, three times, explore its possibilities, retrace my decisions and their consequences, something changes when Danielle's work is shown publicly. Suddenly, you are no longer just a player. You are visible. Maybe you are being judged, maybe it just feels that way—either way, your decisions are revealed. Others can see what you choose, how you hesitate and what you reject. You're not just navigating the inner logic of the work, you're also dealing with the gaze of others, which can suddenly make your experience feel like a performance. You may want to win (if that's even possible), behave in a way you think is perceived as "morally correct," or stay true to yourself. But Danielle doesn't necessarily make it simple to reconcile all these motives. Still, you have to make your choices, as the work does not progress without you.

Although the games can be played alone, I never felt isolated while playing. They create a deeply social experience, highlighting the interplay between individual agency and collective responsibility, prompting me to reflect honestly on my role in bridging the two. As McKenzie Wark writes in A Hacker Manifesto, "the gamification of social relationships shows how video games can simulate truths hidden in the lie of reality."^[3] Danielle takes these truths and transforms them into tools for reflection, resistance, and remaking.

This remaking does not begin in the present; rather, the artist and archivist uses a newly imagined past to create spaces for Black transgender people in the present and to expand them into the future.

THE GAMESPACE AS AN ARCHIVE for a fugitive hope^[4]

As I began to engage with the archival aspects of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's work, I thought about the value of stories—how they shape our understanding of who we are, and how the dominant history reduces a multiplicity of perspectives to a single, authoritative narrative, mostly written by white, Western men. History, like all stories, is written from one point of view, and the dominant one excludes Black trans people.
Yet stories hold so much value as they are told and retold because they help us locate ourselves in the world and in relation to it. They show us what might be possible, simply because it was possible for someone like us before, and they stretch our imagination towards how much further we might go. But if you are not included in those stories, if your identity is missing or misrepresented, then the world they reflect starts to shrink. It becomes a place where your possibilities are harder to name, where your future feels less imaginable. The absence is not just silence; it is a denial of presence, of precedent, of potential. And without stories that reflect you, the act of dreaming becomes lonelier, and survival more precarious.

Since some of her earlier works, Danielle has been addressing the question of what is remembered and what, in turn, is omitted, thus threatening to be forgotten. In doing so, she reflects on the fact that every archive—like her artistic games—is made up of these very decisions. Who is included? Who is telling the story? Under what conditions? These questions run through both the logic of her games and the principles of her archives.

Colonial, Western archives are sites of violence, embodying histories of (im)material theft, dispossession, and dehumanisation. In Resurrection Lands, Danielle created an archive that is not a place of static preservation, but a generative space of possibilities—possibilities for Black trans people to move into a narrative that is built in proximity to their identities, centring their blackness and transness, building on their human essence and feelings, while simultaneously leaving room for individual nuances. It remains alive—not omniscient but tangible and responsive, thus opening up possibilities for healing as it takes one in, allowing one to become part of it. It allows one to be present in its story. Danielle often begins such stories with a return: the return of Black transgender ancestors, gods, and memories. There is a quiet yet powerful persistence in this notion of coming back: they were here. They existed.

AFTER WE HAD DISCOVERED THE TECHNOLOGY TO SCAN THE EARTH AND BRING BACK YOUR MEMORIES BURIED WITHIN ITS HISTORY

WE DECIDED TO BRING YOU BACK

WE THOUGHT HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO STORE YOU IN A WORLD THAT HAD ONCE ERASED YOU

Resurrection becomes a form of resistance not only to erasure, but to the idea that history moves in one direction.

SO WE BUILT THIS PLACE. THE RESURRECTION LANDS.

AN ARCHIVE DESIGNED FOR YOU BY OTHERS LIKE YOU

AND AFTER A WHILE YOUR MEMORIES BEGAN TO FORM BODIES AND BEGAN TO SPEAK

BRINGING YOU BACK TO US

Memory does not remain disembodied but forms a new presence.

The archive, then, is not just a record but also an act of reanimation. A refusal to forget and a re-entry into being. Her works insist that these memories are not abstract; rather, they are body, voice, and movement. They don’t rest quietly on a shelf; they return to speak. However, this space itself is not spared. In Resurrection Lands, Black trans tourism begins to spread, devouring the archive, commercialising its identities. What was created as a place of safe haven becomes vulnerable once again. The question, therefore, shifts onto me, the "player"—the one trying to visit this land: who are you to enter and what are your intentions?

In the process of developing the playable artworks, Danielle often collaborates with a team of Black trans programmers and developers. Being very reflective on her practice, she explains, once something is done and created, it has to enter the final work. This reflects a central tension inherent in archiving: the impossibility of inclusion without exclusion.
Moreover, her works defy aesthetic perfection. The style is deliberately harsh and unpolished, rejecting the smoothness and clarity of commercial games. The work does not exist to be beautiful, but to do something to you—and maybe transform you. The work, the archive, has to have a soul, as the artist insists. It must have a reason to exist.

As the political climate towards transgender people becomes increasingly hostile, Danielle's work responds with even greater urgency, becoming more public and more uncompromising in its demands.

In Trans & Conditions, created in collaboration with CIRCA, her work was brought to the front of the public stage—the digital billboard in Piccadilly Circus. Every evening, the usual commercial glitz is interrupted with pop-up fields of old Microsoft Windows-like error messages reading:

ACTION NEEDED
USE YOUR VOICE TO PROTECT OTHERS

ACTION REQUIRED
ACT NOW
DO YOU WANT TO SPEAK UP FOR THOSE WHO ARE LOSING THEIR RIGHTS

SYSTEM FAILURE
WARNING
THE SYSTEM HAS FAILED. USE YOUR VOICE TO RESET IT!

…

It was a reaction to the ruling of the United Kingdom's Supreme Court, which defined the term "woman" in a way that excluded trans women.

The work continues online and accessible for everyone. At transandconditions.com, visitors are asked to provide their full name. It’s a gesture that may seem small, but in a time when distant anonymity defines our digital lives, it carries unexpected weight. This act of naming connects presence with responsibility as it transforms passive surfing into an active declaration: I am here, and I choose to act. From there, you are guided through a series of questions. Though they seem simple, I had to pause and take my time to find the right words. What am I willing to do to protect the lives of transgender people? Each answer becomes part of a letter. The letter bears my name and is not addressed to a faceless institution, but can be sent to your MP if you live in the UK—and all these letters are published on the website, creating a public archive of solidarity.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley continues this commitment to the audience's capability of action in her exhibition at Serpentine North, whose centrepiece is a game developed over the course of a year in collaboration with over 60 artists, technologists, and thinkers. The exhibition space thus becomes a live testing ground and evolving archive. Inspired by retro gaming, the exploration of digital democracy, and online communities, it rejects mere spectatorship and furthers the question of what happens when the work of art not only remembers for us, but actually remembers with us.

Danielle's archiving practice aims not to complete history but to resist its exclusions. Her digital worlds contain stories not as records but as living forces that demand the continuation of actions. Especially now, when our consumption of social media carries the danger of visibility becoming a substitute for actual engagement, it emphasises that it is not enough to be a mere witness. Her playable artworks are not passive experiences or entertainment; they have a soul because they are rooted in lived realities of Black trans people and shaped by the choices we all make again and again.

The artist thus affirms a fugitive yet urgent hope that is not a utopia, but a responsibility: to expand the worlds she builds, to give them space, so that survival within them does not require escape. Because sometimes the most urgent question is not whether a story will appear in a history book or be confirmed as fact, but whether it can be told at all—whether it can breathe, be heard, and believed to be true. These worlds, with their stories, carry not just the memories of what has been, but the possibility of what could be again.