Gabriel Massan’s Games of Reefs and Rain

These are leaky times. Polar ice is melting, seas are rising and rivers are breaching their banks. Institutions of every variety seem cracked and unable to hold themselves together. Nationalist politicians plot violent strategies of containment. Leaks can be good, however, when they signal the collapse of broken systems – and Gabriel Massan’s Continuity Flaws: Rumors of a Leak (2024) celebrates these fissures in the late-capitalist order.

Debuted as an immersive video installation at Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Continuity Flaws: Rumors of a Leak was co-commissioned by Serpentine Arts Technologies and Tono, the Mexico City-based festival of moving image and performance art. On six screens of differing sizes and shapes appear a randomized selection of digital animations corresponding to a video game, playable on the digital platform Steam. Colourful, spindly creatures resembling sculptures by Niki de Saint Phalle traverse a dreamworld of archipelagos suspended in a stormy grey void that recalls floating land masses from the computer game Myst (1993). Glittering plants, rocks and waterfalls without visible sources form a literal cloud forest, an Amazon in the air. An electronic score by musicians Agazero and Lyzza amplifies its ethereal ambience. Within the ur-grottoes, players encounter spirits who hold their precious ecosystems together. Leaks can threaten the world’s balance – if players choose to steal magical tokens for their own selfish gain – or nourish it, like the game-world’s endless rain.

‘This precarious subsystem that we inhabit allows us to repeat our movements, creating cracks in the limits that were simulated to us’, one leggy character intones. ‘In this agreement that no one sees, the islands remain fragile.’ In other words, nature’s delicate truce depends on rituals of care. According to the wall text, Massan’s cryptic script is indebted to philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva’s essay ‘Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value Against the Arrow of Time’ (2022), a recent touchstone in postcolonial studies. Ferreira da Silva describes the legacy of slavery and colonialism as an ‘unpayable debt’ held by Black and Indigenous people that exacts cruel interest today – during the 2008 housing crash, for instance, thousands of Black and Latinx families were forced into financial ruin by subprime mortgages that lenders knew they would be unable to pay. In Massan’s work, the obligation to settle one’s debts manifests abstractly as a kind of simulation: refuse to accept liabilities as real, and cracks start to show in the system. Banks might go bust, but flowers will bloom, and the world will keep turning just the same.

Continuity Flaws is an extension of Massan’s Third World: The Bottom Dimension (2022–23), in which players hunt for mystical elements like the Crystal of Life or a Bag of Infinite Seeds that, when extracted from subterranean reefs, spell disastrous ecological consequences. The medium seems a natural choice for the 28-year-old artist and avid gamer, and brings a welcome new vision to what is now the world’s most popular art form. Gaming has long been a refuge for queers of colour, a means to create and inhabit more hospitable worlds. Still, the work’s poetically scripted segments are difficult to follow, and perhaps better suited to static reflection on a projection screen.

‘Where do we go from here?’ asks one character. ‘Is the plenum the continuation of the fog?’ The question is repeated five times, a refrain without an obvious referent. A plenum is an air-filled space, and also the general assembly of a legislative body. Democracy is the leakiest thing in the world, and you can imagine it hissing through all the rifts in these animated rock faces. The real question, perhaps, is how to better listen to each other and to nature. That’s the only way we’ll survive the coming flood.

Gabriel Massan’s ‘Continuity Flaws: Rumors of a Leak’ was on view at Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City, Mexico

^{Main image: Gabriel Massan, ‘Continuity Flaws: Rumors of a Leak’ (detail), 2024, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico; photograph: Gerardo Landa}