11° MixLab Spcine
16 NOV (SEG) | das 15h45 às 17h15 | Instituto Cervantes
Isabelle Arvers leads an immersion into the artistic and political possibilities of video games. The activity explores machinima and queer, decolonial and collaborative practices that challenge conventions of gender and representation in games.
Led by: Isabelle Arvers.
ISABELLE ARVERS
Isabelle Arvers is a French artist and exhibition curator with a doctorate in Decolonizing Art and Games. For over twenty years, she has investigated the artistic, ethical and critical dimensions of digital games, developing machinima — films made using video game engines — as a distinct language for artists and communities.
In 2019, she toured countries of the Global South, interviewing 300 artists and game creators involved in queer, feminist and decolonial practices. This research formed the basis of her doctoral thesis, completed in 2024, on decolonizing art and video games.
Her recent work brings ancestral and digital knowledge together. Virtual Tree (Senegal, 2022) and Liquid Forest (2023–2024, with Congolese musician Gaël Manangou) combine sacred forests scanned in 3D, game engines and Indigenous oral traditions. As a member of the Futurs Ancestraux collective, she is developing a trilogy of game-films in Benin in collaboration with Vodun custodians, transforming ritual knowledge, 3D scans of sacred spaces and documentary images into what she calls a digital ritual film. With Lívia Diniz, she leads the Beyond Green Games immersions in Chiang Mai, Marseille and Rio de Janeiro, co-creating machinimas with local communities from recordings of the living world.
