Artists in residence

Gabriel Massan was born in 1996, in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). He is a Brazilian multidisciplinary digital artist, based in Berlin. Across 3D animation, digital sculpting, single-player games, NFTs, and virtual and augmented reality, the artist investigates notions of strangeness and ignorance regarding the imaginary of the ‘Third World’.

Gabriel Massan creates worlds that simulate inequality within the Black-Indigenous Latin American experience by combining storytelling and worldbuilding techniques. Gabriel was the Circa ‘Class of 2021′ Selected Artist, 2022 Bangkok Biennale Online Pavillion Invited Artist, The Photographers’ Gallery Open Space and X Museum’s X Virtual Digital Commission artist, and is a 2022-23 Serpentine Arts Technologies Digital Commission artist.

Through his project, Ball Of Terror, a multidisciplinary series of works, he invites the public to reflect, through interactive storytelling, cases of police brutality and institutional racism, using experiences in simulations, worldbuilding, and games. On that, the project intends to research and discuss the similarities in approach and behavior between the Paris and Sao Paulo police, looking at the aggression against Michael Zecler in 2020 to develop an interactive game experience that portrays spaces of refuge and defense conducted by self-identified targets. In a draw to reroute the outbreaks of violence suffered as a former resident of a drugs conflict territory, Ball Of Terror was first commissioned in 2022 by the X Museum as a metaverse installation and later for a video proposal by the FACT Audiovisual Residency Programme. For on-site broader development in 2023, Gabriel Massan aims to produce its third act during the Art Explora – Cité Internationale Des Arts Residency Program.

Tiganá Santana is a composer, musician, poet, musical producer, artistic director, curator, researcher, teacher and translator. The multi-artist was the first Brazilian composer to present an album, as a composer, with songs in African languages.

With a PhD in Literature from USP, he presented his thesis A cosmologia africana dos bantu-kongo por Bunseki Fu-Kiau: tradução negra, reflexões e diálogos a partir do Brasil (The African cosmology of Bantu-Kongo by Bunseki Fu-Kiau: black translation, reflections and dialogues from Brazil), which was awarded the “Antônio Cândido Prize” for best thesis by ANPOLL (National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Literature and Linguistics).

His most recent productions include the work Floresta de Infinitos (2023), in partnership with the artist Ayrson Heráclito for the 35th São Paulo Biennial; the curatorship of the exhibition Línguas Africanas que Fazem o Brasil (African languages that makes Brazil), at the Museu da Língua Portuguesa, in São Paulo and the release of the album Caçada Noturna (2024).