Virtual reality, 6DoF, 10”, 2022
Distributed by Diversion
Certain historical events defy representation; they offer no analogies, no precedents in experience. These are catastrophes of a new kind, for which our eyes, our ears, and even our language remain unprepared.
Through the story of a survivor who chose not to evacuate her home, All Unsaved Progress Will Be Lost is a sensorial journey that explores our deepest fears and resilience in the face of unimaginable horrors. Voluntarily confined to a space rendered inhospitable, she recounts her vision of the disaster in a surreal landscape made of concrete and fog, a portrayal of a land where no return to origin is possible.
As the calamity remains undisclosed till the final moments, the looming threat remains silent and unnamed, pushing the viewers to confront their own anxieties about possible future catastrophes.
After premiering in 2022 at the Venice Biennale as part of the Immersive Selection, the project went on to be presented at over twenty exhibitions and festivals worldwide. That same year, it received the Best VR Award at Animafest Zagreb.
Video game, immersive installation, 2025
Indulto is an interactive piece in three acts. Each act deliberately subverts the codes of traditional video games, and more specifically the mechanics of tutorials and boss fights. Here, interaction serves only to expose the fiction of choice and the fascination with codified violent rituals.
The title itself, indulto, refers to a rare grace in bullfighting, when a bull is spared in recognition of its courage. Yet even this supposed gesture of mercy remains paradoxical: in the end, the sacrifice is inevitable.
In Indulto, the user advances toward an unavoidable confrontation using a game controller. As progression unfolds, the attack combos to be learned become increasingly absurd, unreadable, and unachievable. When the battle finally begins in the center of the arena, the camera looks away. The clash takes place off-screen. And when it returns, only one decision is offered, to kill or to spare, both leading to the same conclusion: the death of the bull, under the thunder of applause of the crowd.
The work seeks to expose the spectacle that manufactures meaning out of violence, to highlight the illusion of free will when everything has already been scripted, and to question the belief that a violent act becomes acceptable if it is beautiful enough, if it is performed with sufficient grace.
Text by Ingrid Luquet-Gad for Indulto, solo show at New Galerie:
In our post-transcendent world, the deus ex machina has lost all credibility. Those miraculous interventions from above belong to theater, a narrative form tied to sensory experiences unlike our own. Yet in video games, the medium that defines our contemporary moment, fate can still descend from the sky. Mélanie Courtinat’s game Indulto opens with precisely this gesture: a caparisoned bull-God tears through the clouds and crashes to earth. An Edenic clearing of flowers breaks its fall. A sword tumbles loose. Our quest begins, and so does the game.
For her first solo exhibition at New Galerie, the 1993-born artist presents a new game. Its title refers to the Spanish bullfighting term for a pardon granted to the animal at the audience’s request. Players assume the role of a torero, an androgynous, elegant figure fated to confront the fallen beast. What follows is a double education. First, players learn the familiar conventions of the boss fight: Walk, Run, Jump through moss-covered landscapes in search of the legendary sword. But gradually, a second lesson emerges, one drawn from tragic drama itself. Screen by screen, players recognize that their choices are scripted, their agency circumscribed, their free will an illusion.
The game refuses escape from the start. Two buttons appear: “Play” and “Quit.” Only the first functions. The second simply confirms that desertion is impossible. A long corridor stretches toward the arena. Along the way, prompts teach increasingly elaborate attack combinations: Rear finishing blow, Sliding dodge, Fatal combo—escalating toward absurdity until the genre’s smooth mechanics begin to falter. The climactic confrontation itself happens offscreen, replaced by a final choice: “Spare” (X) or “Kill”. Yet this choice is false as the bull dies regardless, killed either by the player or by a crowd that refuses mercy.
This ending revives the “tragic status of the agent” from ancient narrative while exposing gameplay itself as voluntary servitude: the acceptance of rules imposed by others. But Courtinat’s project extends beyond adapting tragic or existentialist themes. Video game agency raises questions entirely its own. Throughout her practice, composed exclusively of immersive digital works, the artist builds worlds and deconstructs conventions in equal measure. Her sustained attention to player position, cinematic language, and interactive systems produces melancholic universes marked by layered temporalities and sudden eruptions of violence or luminosity. The gesture, however, is twofold. In transforming spectators into players, she also critiques the art world’s own protocols—spaces where we perform viewing as much as we enact parasocial relations.
At New Galerie, the game’s presentation is deliberately spare: a chair, a controller, a projection. An unadorned invitation to confront destiny and collective judgment. Downstairs, a video monitor displays the two protagonists frozen in idle stance, which designates the looping animation that plays when no one engages. In The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich identifies navigable space precisely as what is specific to video games. He writes: “In contrast to modern literature, theater and cinema, which are built around psychological tensions between characters and movement in psychological space, these computer games return us to ancient forms of narrative in which the plot is driven by the spatial movement of the main hero [...].”
Thus, Indulto’s deflated heroism makes room for contemplation within a medium still synonymous with action.
Short film shot inside a video game, 20”35, 2026
Elden Ring is a video game widely known for its high level of difficulty. Players must confront enemies through a series of demanding encounters, where even the smallest mistake is severely punished. Each fight relies on extreme precision and the anticipation of enemy patterns.
Some exceptional players push this challenge further by attempting what are known as no-hit runs: a way of playing in which the entire attempt is considered a failure the moment the player takes any damage. Some players even reduce their health bar to the minimum as a performative gesture, reinforcing the idea that being hit even once is not an option. Defeating major bosses without being hit is a documented practice within the community and requires exceptional skill, developed through dozens of hours of repeated practice.
Mélanie’s Favour is a modded shield, a custom in-game item created by modifying the game’s data. Unlike any other shield in the game, it is intentionally designed not to protect the player from damage. Equipping it provides almost no safety in combat and is intended for highly skilled players only. The shield is conceived as a symbolic “favour,” inspired by medieval courtly traditions in which a knight would receive a token from a lady before entering a dangerous battle.
In the film, the player Celnadmery3480 performs a series of boss fights while deliberately wearing this shield.
Video game + virtual reality experience, 2025
Distributed by Diversion
The Siren is a video game artwork that challenges the conventions of play, narrative, and agency. It questions why we act in games, why we obey their rules so readily, and what kind of meaning we expect our actions to produce. Designed for an art exhibition context, the work is accessible to players unfamiliar with video games, while offering deeper layers of interpretation for those who know their codes.
The game begins with a familiar setup: you control a heroine in shimmering armor, guided by an omniscient narrator, apparently tasked with rescuing a damsel in distress. Yet before this “main quest” can begin, you are instructed to complete a minor one: collecting glowing seashells scattered along a deserted beach at dusk. As the game progresses, the narrator’s voice grows increasingly present and insistent. What begins as guidance turns into command, and the player is pushed to comply. This gradual takeover foregrounds a central question: why do we obey authority in games so easily? And what happens when we refuse?
The Siren draws a parallel between the logic of side quests, such as collecting hundreds of Korok seeds in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and the way we structure our lives around various tasks in order to distract ourselves from the certainty of death. Learning new skills, optimizing routines, falling in love: we remain in motion, hoping that meaning will eventually emerge through repetition. These self-imposed rituals function as fragile buffers against the void, temporary systems of meaning designed to keep existential anxiety at bay.
At its core, The Siren also questions the fantasy of romantic salvation: the belief that saving someone, or finding an “other half,” might finally make us whole, that love, might shield us from the absurdity of existence, that if we are the main character, the story must lead somewhere. The player’s journey unfolds through subtle choices, leading to multiple endings. The so-called “good ending” is difficult to reach, and offers no real resolution.
TEN LANDS
Video game, 2020Ten Lands is a hybrid format that oscillates between an interactive video clip and a video game. Each level visually illustrates one of the ten ambient music tracks from Yatoni’s eponymous album.
Ten Lands opens, in an underlying way, a double reflection that crosses both the video game industry and the music industry. This reflection emerged at a time when music could no longer inhabit public spaces and gatherings were forbidden. Far from clubs and concerts, new spaces and ways of experiencing music began to emerge.
With Ten Lands, the artist seeks to bridge the disciplines of music videos and video games. By merging the interactive format of one and the stakes of the other, Ten Lands is a cross-genre format in which each sound composition unfolds in relation to a specific virtual place. Landscapes and sounds happen and resonate simultaneously.
From then on, Ten Lands raises the issue of spatiality when listening to an album. Here the logics of unfolding the musical titles differ from those already in place, especially on streaming platforms such as Spotify or Soundcloud. Indeed, where one click is enough to start the next track, Ten Lands requires a journey.
By including the notion of space, distance and thus chronology, Ten Lands initiates a new logic of filiation when listening to a music album; close to the one, in particular, that animates the vinyl record. In fact, in the same way that the vinyl record requires listening to music one after the other, this new format requires that steps be taken in order to unroll the musical thread, unlike platforms that follow a logic of "deferred" listening, and the possibility of a disorderly discover. Here, this format pushes and gives you the opportunity to literally go through Yatoni's album.
Furthermore, from another perspective, the artist deliberately chose not to personalize every aspect of the experience. In Ten Lands, a single, enigmatic entity traverses the ten worlds. The avatar envisioned by the artist is defined by its anonymity: its thick, opaque metal armor conceals not only its face but any cues to its gender. Silent by nature, neither its voice nor its gait reveals any hint of its identity, making it impossible to discern distinct features or skin tone. In this way, the protagonist of Ten Lands stands as an inclusive figure, open for anyone to embody.
