EVENT: PASTINACA VIDEOTAPES PLANTATION (2–15 JANUARY 2026)
Machinimentary: 1993, San Andreas.
digital video, color, sound, 1 hour, 43 minutes, 33 seconds, 2023, various (possibly: Kazakhstan, Hong Kong, China and Switzerland).
created by Pastinaca Videotapes Plantation (PVP)
introduced by Matteo Bittanti
Machinimentary: 1993, San Andreas. is a feature-length pseudo-documentary that treats the snowbound streets of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as evidence from a forgotten conflict. The film begins with a damaged home video of Fariq Husmanov, a Talysh journalist glimpsed briefly before the tape dissolves into static. From that fragment, the narrative drifts between post-Soviet Azerbaijan and the fictional state of San Andreas, once on camcorder, once inside a videogame engine. Timecodes, military speeches, children posing by a river, soldiers firing through blizzards: the footage accumulates into a chronicle whose borders refuse to settle. Formally, PVP treats game engines as another fragile recording format. Heavily altered builds of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto V share the frame with indie horror titles (Fears to Fathom – Norwood Hitchhike, Beware), all processed through layers of faux-VHS degradation. Fan-made modifications, scripted missions and CLEO plugins exaggerate the series’ already awkward physics: trucks crawl uphill in uncanny slow motion, avatars jerk through heavy snow, muzzle flashes puncture the frame like corrupted pixels. The result reads less as war reportage than as an inquiry into how history is rewritten each time footage is dubbed, re-edited or ported into a different machine.
Pastinaca Videotapes Plantation (PVP) is a self-described Eurasian online collective working between counter-archive practice, television archaeology and machinima essay film. The group claims to bring together unnamed directors, coders and graphic artists who first coalesced in 2022 across China, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus and Switzerland, before “reorganising” in 2024 around members in Kazakhstan, Hong Kong, China and Switzerland. The roster is unverifiable by design: anonymity and shifting geographies are folded into the work as part of its fiction machine. PVP scours stray VHS cassettes, bootleg compilations and broadcast leftovers, treating them as volatile material rather than nostalgic relics. Across projects such as A Found Soviet, Ephemeral Ladies, PIF (Panic Information Film), SHTF and Machinimentary: 1993, San Andreas., the collective splices analog residue with digital engines, ersatz television formats and pseudo-official voice-overs. The videos oscillate between historical investigation and deadpan hoax, testing how (and whether) viewers can still distinguish documentary evidence, state propaganda and game footage once everything has been copied, compressed and uploaded beyond context.