Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is tired of being nice

When her practice shifted from films to video games, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley was able to focus on the thing that interests her the most: the audience. She tells me, holding onto a mug of Lemsip for dear life in Studio Voltaire, where she is about to open ‘THE REBIRTHING ROOM’, that any art show is “all dressing, to make you feel something,” that the art itself – whether it’s paintings on the wall, or Brathwaite-Shirley’s own work – is the dressing, and the point of it is to make the audience think about themselves in a new way. This leads the artist to tell me that if, coming out of the end of it, “the dressing is all you can focus on, then the show did nothing.”

It was audience response – or rather, a lack of it – that seemed to act as a catalyst for Brathwaite-Shirley’s transition into video games. She says that someone approached her after seeing the last ‘big film’ she made, DIGGING FOR BLACK TRANS LIFE (2019), and explained  that the reason they liked the film so much was that it gave them the ability to “suck up all the visuals and ignore the message.” In the wake of this frustration, she decided that now was the time to “make the games interactive,” so that you need to “engage with the work to get anything out of it.” This shift in form has become about, in the artist’s own words, “being less kind to the audience.”

This lack of kindness makes the most sense when approaching Brathwaite-Shirley’s work through the lens of video game history. The two of us share formative memories of gaming with the lo-fi, blocky character models of the original PlayStation, something that she calls “kind of magic,” with the artist being fascinated by seeing real-life figures turned into digital avatars. She says she was “gobsmacked” playing Enter the Matrix (2003) and described the experience as like “playing the movie.” From here on, video games became “the extension of [her] real universe,” using RPG games like Dragon’s Dogma (2012) as a way of trying out “what I wanted to look like and what I did look like,” and “try out names for myself.” Of course, she adds, deadpan and self-effacing, “I just added a ‘le’ to the end.” Through this prism, we see video games as spaces of play and empowerment – we digress on the artistry of Kitty Horrorshow’s indie games, and how the latest remake of Resident Evil 4 takes you in and out of the power fantasy of being a one-man army – which leads Brathwaite-Shirley to settle on the idea that her games are “disempowerment fantasies.”

“For me, failing is part of it”, she says, hoping that rather than people seeing the games as fun, it would be better if they left “frustrated, annoyed, questioning if it should be this hard,” in the hope that it makes visitors think about themselves more. It’s no surprise then, that her work is designed with politics in mind – this is, after all, a game that declares YOU NEED TO WAKE THE FUCK UP AND JUST ADMIT THAT THE WORLD IS FUCKED. Her approach to making the work political seems to stem from a desire to shine a light on the audience themselves: “I often hear people blaming everything but themselves. I think we’re super divided; I think the division was always there, but now it’s clear that there are camps, and then within those camps, there are ways of saying things.”

She admits that she’s in a bubble herself, insisting that “it would be stupid to say I’m not in a bubble; I’m a Black trans person and I’m just [totally] free.” But if she is in a bubble, one of the mission statements of her art seems to be expanding the space that a bubble like hers can take up. The spaces of her games are often foregrounded as being pro-trans, and pro-Black – and ‘THE REBIRTHING ROOM’ is no exception. “The attempt is that the people I feel so close to can go into the space and say I can take something away from this,” she tells me, percussively tapping her hands on the table between us for emphasis.“I don’t know if I’m good at making them feel that way until they go in and feel it.”

There’s a lot you can feel when confronted by ‘THE REBIRTHING ROOM’: the political urgency of the text; the surreal way that the world of the video game becomes physical in the space; even the frustrating difficulty of the games themselves – Brathwaite-Shirley tells me that the games’ “addiction pathway is almost impossible to beat,” as a mirror to the challenges of addiction itself, but only if you’re able to let the dressing fall by the wayside, and open yourself up to her strange, uncertain worlds.