EVENT: YANNIS MOHAND BRIKI (AUGUST 21—SEPTEMBER 3 2026)
THE UNRAPTURED BIRDS DIVE INTO THE PACIFIC BLUE FOREVER
digital video/machinima, 20 min 40 sec, 2026, France
created by Yannis Mohand Briki
introduced by Matteo Bittanti
THE UNRAPTURED BIRDS DIVE INTO THE PACIFIC BLUE FOREVER concludes Yannis Mohand Briki’s COMING OF (R)AGE trilogy, turning from childhood and adolescence to old age. An elderly Sim moves through motels, restaurants, desert roads, hotel rooms, pools, and leisure facilities while addressing an absent figure through intertitles. A late-night television advertisement offers him a toll-free “Neutral Ending.” Tropical décor, aquariums, jacuzzis, and the Windows XP wallpaper Azul recur as images of elsewhere. Briki incorporates The Sims 2’s own old-age death sequence before leaving the game engine altogether. The film ends on a Google Street View image, outside the simulation.
Yannis Mohand Briki is a Paris-based artist and filmmaker working across machinima, video, installation, performance, and game-based fiction. He graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy in 2022 and is a member of Distraction Collective. Briki frequently works with video games and other digital image-making systems as environments for fiction, recollection, and experimentation. The Sims 2 forms the basis of his three-part COMING OF (R)AGE cycle: YESTERDAY WAS MY BIRTHDAY SO I ASKED FOR LEGS TO RUN AWAY (2024), THE INSUFFERABLE WEIGHT OF BEING A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD MURDERER (2025), and THE UNRAPTURED BIRDS DIVE INTO THE PACIFIC BLUE FOREVER (2026). Across the trilogy, Briki combines machinima with written intertitles and, at times, images produced through other recording systems, including family DV footage, surveillance imagery, and Google Street View. His wider practice includes Biskra Palms, a video game project centred on an unreachable desert resort and migration narratives connected to Algerian family histories. Recent works include La Nuit de l’Ogresse (2021), Bonne nuit Xali(2024), Red Skies, Violet Dreams (2024), and LOVEBOMB (2025).