GAME ART: ESTELLE FLORES REMEMBERS THROUGH VIDEO GAMES

Estelle Flores: Contém Ingredientes de Verdade

May 17 - July 26 2025

MuMA Digital Art Center (Rua República Argentina, 3430 – Portão, Curitiba – PR)

Curated by biarritzzz

The Digital Art Center of the Curitiba Municipal Art Museum (MuMA) is currently hosting the exhibition Contém Ingredientes de Verdade (“Contains Real Ingredients”) by Estelle Flores. The solo show, which opened May 17 2025, is curated by biarritzzz, and examines video games as a site for artistic experimentation, performance, and personal memory. Spanning four years of creative work, Flores’s videos and images unfold within digital environments such as The Sims and Grand Theft Auto, interrogating the thin veil separating simulation from lived experience.

Adopting the video game platform as a kind of visual diary, the artist documents gestures of intimacy, ritual, and the minutiae of everyday life. In these works, play becomes more than recreation; it emerges as a speculative mode of existence, a canvas for imagining, recollecting, and re-enacting the self. Based in Curitiba, Estelle Flores has been exploring digital art practices with a particular emphasis on simulation games since 2020. Her practice fuses machinima with strategies of post-photography, situating games as both medium and method. Throughout her works, Flores engages the dual meanings of “play” (to game and to perform) while drawing connections to broader existential concerns about the nature of identity and narrative.

For example, the video triptych History of Me, comprising the short videos One Day, Dreams, and Cargo, offers a pointed reflection on the occluded, inaccessible zones within virtual environments. Using a horizontal split-screen, these works invite viewers to reflect on how such digital occlusion mirrors the frustrated desires and deferred dreams generated by a society organized around spectacle.

Estelle Flores is a contemporary artist living in Curitiba-PR, graduated in Design from UP and currently studying for a master's degree in Communication and Semiotics from PUC-SP. Since 2020, she has been developing game art and machinima works, exploring simulation games such as The Sims 4 in investigations on performance and the unconscious. She is a member of the Brutas collective, with which she carries out actions and exhibitions. Her work has been presented in spaces such as the Museum of the Moving Image (USA) and Fu:Bar Glitchart Festival (Croatia).