SISSI club’s proposal for Material 2024 brings together the practice of Madison Bycroft (AUS), Corentin Darré (FR) and Samir Laghouati-Rashwan (FR), and features a selection of works highlighting the use of digital media to consider the presence of queer and racialized bodies, their existence and their empowerment within them. The artists create new virtual representation around notions of fetishization, cruising and ecology, mixed with iconographic elements from popular culture. Through the creation of video games, 3D images or the installation of sculptures in the form of an arcade game, these artists play on both the exploration afforded by virtual reality and the visibility of practices or histories.

‘Only good vibes’ by Samir Laghouati-Rashwan is a series of resin sculptures imprisoning images that evoke a certain idea of popular culture and entertainment, combined with documents relating to politics and colonial history. Through this practice of collage, the artist provokes discussion and digression on the social and political symbolics contained within these icons. Playing with the properties of resin, the artist inserts, freezes and camouflages in order to make stories visible, or on the contrary, to blur their tracks.

‘Joystick’ is a participatory digital video project created by Madison Bycroft in collaboration with Ubisoft and Carreau Du Temple (Paris, FR). The work consists of a 3D chaotic world that is both pop and desert-like, linked to an ecological question. Built in Unity, it can be navigated using a video game controller, customized by the artist. The user is encouraged to explore the game, whose direction and intent can be countered by location, weather and other environmental factors.
Through these modalities, the artist invites us to unlearn the proprioception and to take the time to experiment: How do we position our own bodies in relation to the reading of others? How do we face each other? What do we turn our backs to when we move in a particular direction? Which elements do we choose to look at to the exclusion of others? This work will not allow the player to ‘capture’ anything. Something always escapes, and the world remainsmystified, making it difficult to master, map and read this environment. In parallel, Bycroft has produced seven videos sung by «bosses» encountered on the various islands of the archipelago, all remixed by different musicians. By reappropriating this classic video game enemy, they thwart the mode of combat in favor of error, disobedience and wandering.

Corentin Darré explores how virtual and real dimensions intermingle and interact. Using patinas and glosses, he gives these objects a whimsical dimension, reminiscent of the items needed for a player’s quest or the textures used in gameplay. These scripted works evoke the rejection, love, violence and addiction of relationships with others, as well as the pain of loneliness and the abandonment of isolated bodies. In the ongoing series ‘I’m boy you can’t hold IRL’, the artist represents homosexual romances, as well as the practice of cruising in a virtual world. Corentin Darré questions the representation of those love gestures and their existence in unchosen, hidden spaces.