My name is Gabriel Massan; I am a Berlin-based Brazilian digital sculptor and new media artist working with storytelling and world-building. My research tackles and creates worlds that simulate and narrate situations of inequality within the Latin American experience. Framed through a conceptual practice I call ‘fictional archaeology,’ and working across 3D animation, digital sculpture, games, sound, and interactive installations, I aim to challenge warped conceptions of the so-called ‘Third World’ while investigating possibilities for subversive otherness.

Taking cues from academic Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation,” a practice of including fictional detail alongside factual material to expand, develop, and add specificity to writing about Black history, I make use of my experiences as markers to guide my exploration of the worlds I seek to build, not as a map for those that follow them. By immersing viewers of my works in systems designed to reveal the inequalities and injustices experienced in contemporary colonial nation-states, my work invites the public to rethink our relationship with the world around us, a process of communal narrative crafting that, in Hartman’s words, functions as “a way of naming our time, thinking our present and envisioning the past which has created it.”

HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
In a landscape marked by political divisions and the reinforcement of existing binaries, my perception of the role of artists has only grown more salient over the last years: the issue of representation is fundamental and might help us think about the various global urges. The ideas of liberation and breaking free highly resonate in their social and political meanings and their implications for marginalized communities.

My research has manifested and created worlds where existing power structures fall upon the reenactment of new digital materialities. In short, my work aims to open up possibilities of living together that are not bound by not only physical but primarily social and political constructs that have marked contemporary nation-states: capitalism, colonialism, and so on.

Here, I am emphasizing artists’ capacity further to push the boundaries of collective forms of imagination.

WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
I want to continue investigating and discussing the impact of the genocide of young black Brazilians by the war on drugs on the hegemonic collective imagination. Developing worlds and simulations through cross-cultural collaborations with artists, researchers and developers in a wider array of perspectives, from the questioning of episodes of the curtailment of cultural expressions by police operations and institutional racism, reintroducing my family context and the testimonies of my relatives.

FOLLOW GABRIEL MASSAN ON INSTAGRAM