Arts and video games at Jardin des Traverses.
Video, installation, performance, music, exhibition, video game. As part of Nuit Blanche, Jardin des Traverses hosts an encounter between two collectives exploring video games as an artistic medium: Fantasia Malware, based in Berlin, and Distraction, a Paris-based collective. Through playable installations, films, and performances, their practices examine video game narrative forms, virtual worlds, and the stories they produce, between fiction, autobiography, and social critique. The exhibition brings together several works. Chevalhalla (Florie Souday, 2026) immerses the audience in a purgatory populated by horses from video games. The player embodies a forgotten mount and travels through a world where equines from different universes coexist, adopting the perspective of these essential yet often overlooked companions. Into the Heavens follows two jesters trying to escape an oppressive authority figure, while Landlords tells the story of a life through five landlords, somewhere between a visual poem and a critique of the reproduction of capital. The Life of Saint Fiona Bianco Xena is an interactive work in which a woman's story changes depending on who is looking at it, questioning how public narratives are constructed. Several projects explore memory, ruins, and ghostly spaces. Where Do Dead Malls Go? invites players to explore an abandoned shopping mall inspired by PlayStation 1 aesthetics, between urbex, fascination with contemporary ruins, and reflection on the decline of late capitalism. Biskra Palms constructs a fictional space from a Californian park inspired by an Algerian oasis, blending family memory, migration, grief, and mirages. Rayon Vert is an interactive writing experience in which the player becomes the apparent author of a text they do not fully control, raising questions of responsibility and attachment. Finally, The unraptured birds dive in the pacific blue forever, a film made using The Sims 2, explores old age, death, and the persistence of characters after their disappearance, in a contemplative atmosphere inspired by a digital paradise. Taken as a whole, the exhibition considers video games as spaces for creation, memory, and projection, capable of hosting intimate, political, and speculative narratives, where virtual worlds become places inhabited by our contemporary ghosts.
Source: paris.fr — photo: Esther des Abbayes