Ana María Millán &

Desert

In an era marked by what Rebecca Solnit describes as a »failure of imagination«, Millán's work investigates the potential of gaming as a tool for collective worldmaking. Her practice often employs live-action role-playing (LARP) as a framework to craft scenes that weave together fiction and political criticism, while embracing irony and unpredictability. Her work Desert is a computer simulation and video game that traces a journey beginning in a coal mine in Cali, Colombia, and leading to a barren desert inhabited by a vast mass of petroleum. The game delves into oil as a fluid force that shapes and governs global dynamics. Players navigate this landscape under the guidance of worms, who act as both navigators and excavators, burrowing deep into the earth’s core.

Aware that digital animation and computer graphics were partly developed for military purposes during the Cold War, Millán reclaims the medium as an instrument of world-building. Co-imagination and the complex entanglement of utopia and dystopia take center stage in her practice, reflecting the complex and ambivalent realities we inhabit and co-create. Millán’s approach to game creation fosters collective agency, where mistakes are integral to the process, and the interaction between player and environment is reciprocal. Permeability is key—both in terms of the boundaries between virtual and physical worlds and in the connections forged between human and non-human actors. In her work, in fact, the emphasis on interspecies relationships reminds us that our existence is fundamentally relational, inherently shaped by the ecosystems and beings that surround and inhabit us. (Vanina Saracino)

3D and programing: Andres Sandoval Alba and Ana María Millán
Audio: Maya Saravia

Images: Ana María Millán, Desert, 2023-2024 © Ana María Millán

About the artist

Ana María Millán *1975 in Cali, COL, lives and works in Berlin, GER. Studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, GBR, at the Instituto Departamental de Bellas Artes, Cali, COL
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