Archives are often imagined as places of preservation. Yet every archive is also a record of absence. For every story that survives, countless others disappear. Names are omitted. Lives go unrecorded. Histories are lost through neglect, indifference or design.

For more than five years, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley has dedicated her practice to confronting this process of erasure. Working across animation, performance, sound and video game design, the Berlin and London-based artist creates spaces in which Black Trans lives are not merely represented but actively remembered. Her works challenge audiences with questions that are often uncomfortable in their directness: Who is missing? Who is responsible? What will future generations know about the people we chose not to protect?

Trans & Conditions emerges at a moment when these questions feel increasingly urgent. Created in response to the UK Supreme Court’s recent ruling redefining the meaning of “woman” under the Equality Act, the commission addresses a political landscape in which rights, protections and forms of recognition that once appeared settled have become newly contested. Yet rather than simply documenting this moment, Brathwaite-Shirley transforms it into a site of action.

At the centre of the project sits a deceptively simple proposition. What happens if participation replaces spectatorship?

Broadcast nightly across London’s Piccadilly Lights and a screen in Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, the commission appears as a system in distress. Text flickers. Warnings emerge. Images glitch and fracture. Drawing upon the visual language of operating systems, error messages and digital interfaces, the work presents itself as a kind of malfunction. The effect is deliberate. As Brathwaite-Shirley describes it, a “critical error” has occurred. Not within a computer system, but within the social systems through which people are recognised, protected and allowed to belong.

The work extends beyond the screen through transandconditions.com, an interactive platform that guides visitors through a series of questions. Some are practical, others are deeply personal. What do you want the government to do? What are you afraid might happen? What would you say to a trans person who is scared right now?

The responses are assembled into public letters, transforming private reflection into collective testimony. Visitors can send these letters directly to their Members of Parliament, while a growing archive accumulates throughout the project. In partnership with UNCLE, selected texts are fly-posted across London’s streets, returning individual voices to public space. At the conclusion of the commission, the full archive is delivered to 10 Downing Street.

This movement between screen, street and political institution reflects a broader shift within Brathwaite-Shirley’s practice. While earlier works frequently imagined speculative worlds in which players navigated complex moral and social choices, Trans & Conditions collapses the distance between fiction and reality. The audience itself becomes the medium.

Throughout her career, Brathwaite-Shirley has resisted the idea of passive viewership. Her games, installations and performances rarely allow audiences to remain neutral observers. Instead, participants are repeatedly confronted with decisions that expose their values, assumptions and responsibilities toward others. In one work, visitors are asked to choose who is remembered and who is forgotten. In another, they are required to decide whether they will intervene or remain silent. The questions change, but the underlying proposition remains constant: neutrality is itself a decision.

That principle takes on particular significance in 2025. If previous projects explored the mechanics of erasure, Trans & Conditions addresses the conditions through which erasure becomes possible. The title echoes the familiar terms and conditions accepted every day in digital life, agreements entered into without being read, systems accepted without scrutiny. Brathwaite-Shirley repurposes this language to ask what conditions are being imposed upon trans existence itself, and who is being asked to accept them.

Yet despite the gravity of its subject, Trans & Conditions is ultimately a work about collective possibility. Throughout conversations surrounding the project, Brathwaite-Shirley repeatedly returns to the importance of mutual support, community organisation and shared responsibility. The commission refuses despair. Instead, it proposes that moments of crisis can become moments of clarity, revealing where solidarity already exists and where it must still be built.

At a time when public discourse often reduces trans lives to abstraction, debate or headline, Trans & Conditions insists upon something more fundamental: presence. To speak. To listen. To remember. To act.

The question is no longer whether participation is possible.

The question is what we choose to do next.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a Berlin and London-based artist whose work preserves and celebrates the lives of Black trans people through animation, performance, video games, sound and drawing. Combining lived experience with speculative fiction, they create immersive worlds that challenge audiences to confront questions of memory, responsibility and belonging, asking who is remembered, who is forgotten and who gets to decide.

A leading voice within a new generation of artists working across digital and physical space, Brathwaite-Shirley has developed a distinctive visual language that transforms participation into a political act. Their works often place viewers within interactive environments where choices carry consequences, creating encounters that are at once playful, uncomfortable and deeply human. Through this approach, they have established one of the most urgent and innovative artistic practices working today.

In 2025, Brathwaite-Shirley collaborated with CIRCA on Trans & Conditions, a major multi-platform commission spanning public screens, digital participation and print. Created in response to growing pressures facing trans communities, the project invited audiences worldwide to contribute messages of solidarity while amplifying trans voices across public space. The commission reflected a wider commitment shared by both artist and platform: using art not simply to represent the world, but to actively reshape it.

Brathwaite-Shirley’s work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Barbican, Fundació Joan Miró, Studio Voltaire, FACT Liverpool, LAS Art Foundation, Julia Stoschek Foundation and the Project Arts Centre. A graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, they continue to push the boundaries of contemporary art through works that blend technology, storytelling and collective action into new forms of cultural memory.