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Drawing from the performativity of digital subjectivities and playing hostess to many persuasive political discourses, Ana María Millán’s artistic practice is shaped by a strong feminist ethic and marked by her participatory projects in collaboration with different constituencies. The artist works with gaming, live-action role-play, re-enactment, and virtual world-building as a means of social commentary. Her hypnotizing digital animations and drawings animate protagonists that embody a temporal experience and spatialize a narrative logic to chronicle present-day realities of ecological precarity as well as state and militaristic violence. 

For the new video game Happy People (2020), Millán collaborated with a group of local LARPers, gamers, art students, and cosplayers in a character-building workshop in Gwangju. A special exploration of Korean animation history and reflections on gendered dimensions of online gaming and political unrest emerged from her collaboration with FAMERZ, a collective of feminist gamers active in South Korea. Alluding to the politics of coalition-building and representation, the collective and participatory process of live-action role-play that involves mirroring and reinventing existing realities became the starting point for Happy People.

Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala

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