Gabriel Massan: How Do We Get There?
Germany/Brazil, 2024
Duration: 13 min
Language: English
Courtesy of the Artist
Berlin-based artist Gabriel Massan’s video installation How Do We Get There? is an open-ended question: how do you organise your travel to a desired location if you don’t have the required cultural, financial or physical means? The work is part of the artist’s latest animation series HOW, which creates a digital universe that addresses the cultural practice of train hopping in Brazil.
Marking Massan’s first time using motion capture, How Do We Get There? is filmed in the computer game engine Unreal Engine and follows three characters as they travel through a hostile environment, attempting to find a way out of their restrictive social reality. Depending on one’s point of departure, reaching or even just choosing a destination is not always easy. How Do We Get There? is both an open world and a journey filled with unforeseen challenges, comforting encounters, and major life choices.
Gabriel Massan is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist. Combining storytelling and worldbuilding, Massan creates worlds that simulate and narrate situations of inequality within the Latin American experience. Framed through ‘fictional archaeology’, and working across 3D animation, digital sculpture, games, sound, and interactive installations, the artist uses machinima techniques to challenge warped conceptions of the Global South while investigating possibilities for ‘subversive otherness’. Their work has recently been showcased at BOZAR, Brussels, BE (2025); MAM Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, BR (2024); Centre Pompidou-Metz, FR (2023); and Serpentine, UK (2023), amongst others.