THE ARTIST WHO PLAYED WITH GHOSTS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF REWELL ALTUNAGA (1977-2024)
I learned of Rewell’s death today, more than a year after it happened, through an article by Ray Sanchez for CNN.According to the journalist, his body had been found in the Hudson River in June 2024, unrecognisable after weeks in the water.
For a long time, no one knew who he was. When the Medical Examiner finally confirmed his identity, his former partner Naivy Perez filed a missing persons report, the news was painful, though not unexpected. Those of us who had known him, even from afar, had been carrying that fear for some time.Born in Camagüey in 1977, Altunaga was trained in ceramics, painting, and photography. He became one of the first Cuban artists to engage with video games not as entertainment, but as a material for critical work. While others painted or sculpted, he hijacked, hacked, and reprogrammed.
His projects drew on the visual and procedural logics of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Delta Force: Black Hawk Down – Team Sabre, and Arma 2 among others, to explore questions of memory, displacement, and control. I first spoke to him in 2013 and arranged an interview. Eventually, the conversation became an interview for GameScenes. “As a kid,” he told Mathias. “I spent my time playing video games with my peers… an entire generation of Cubans grew up in the small worlds of Mario, Contra, Duke, Doom, Quake, and other games.” These weren’t diversions, he said, but tools, raw material to create art. We immediately bonded.Rewell made art under the extreme constraints of Cuban life. In the post-Soviet period, electronics were scarce. As he explained in our conversation, the internet was heavily regulated and prohibitively expensive. Consoles were smuggled in. He worked with what was available: outdated hardware, pirated files, unstable connections. He didn’t present these conditions as obstacles, but used them to shape a practice that was intentionally unstable, discontinuous, and critical. The street finds its own use for things, said William Gibson. He embodied that motto.
As Rachel Price explains in Planet/Cuba, digital art on the island developed under both material and ideological pressure. Rewell responded with work that returned those pressures to view. In 2013, Rachel wrote a superb analysis of Rewell’s early game-driven work for Frieze magazine. Her essay captured the political and aesthetic stakes of his practice with clarity and precision. I later translated an extended version of that text for inclusion in this critical anthology. It remains one of the few sustained engagements with his work available in English or Spanish. As far as I know, it is the most articulate reflection on the early phase of Rewell’s digital practice.His collaboration with Liz Munsell on Cuban Virtualities at Tufts University in 2013 helped frame these concerns for an international audience. The exhibition explored how limited access to digital tools shaped a generation of artists. But Rewell’s work was never just a record of scarcity. It questioned how digital systems operate, who they serve, and how they are unevenly distributed.
His work was shaped by local constraints, but it refused to be provincial. He was able to represent the ludic as inherently political, in a nuanced, non-didactic way. I never met him in person. Like several of the artists I have admired and collaborated with over the past decade, our connection was parasocial, mediated through screens, yet it felt genuine and meaningful to me. My friend Juan Carlos met him in Havana more than ten years ago. He passed along a message from me about upcoming exihibitions. They shared rum and spoke about their plans to move to the United States and start a new adventure.Alas, according to Sanchez, Rewell never adjusted to life in the US. He moved to New York in 2014 with the possibility of an MFA, which he quickly abandoned. Without the informal support networks he had relied on in Cuba, his situation became precarious. The following years brought housing instability, addiction, and untreated mental illness. He was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia.
He spent time in shelters, hospitals, and jail, mostly in Harlem. At one point, a tabloid labelled him the “squirrel man” after an altercation with a reporter. That image stuck. But to those who had known him, he remained someone deeply absorbed in the work of thinking, even during periods of confusion and crisis.We featured his powerful work ELEGIA in the 2016 exhibition GAME VIDEO ART. A SURVEY, held in Milan, Italy. Created using Battlefield 4, the piece places the viewer alone in the middle of an unbroken ocean. There are no objectives, no enemies, no markers, only the steady movement of water and the disquiet of being suspended between locations, identities, or outcomes. He dedicated the work to those who had died crossing borders by sea in search of refuge or survival. At the time, it felt like a meditation on collective loss: Mare nostrum, mare monstrum.
In retrospect, it seems harder to separate from the circumstances of his own disappearance. Not a premonition exactly, but a work that had already begun to think through what it means to vanish, to be unaccounted for.I remember being struck by how firmly he refused my request for an interview about the piece. He declined without hesitation, and I didn’t press further. We presented ELEGIAwithout commentary, unlike most works featured in the exhibition. That silence stayed with me, not as a rejection, but as a boundary he needed to maintain. At the time, I didn’t understand what he was trying to protect, or perhaps what he was already retreating from. In my curatorial naivety, I assumed he was dealing with imposter syndrome, something I knew all too well.
In reality, the demons that haunted him were harder to name, and harder to escape. At some point, Sanchez writes, he began destroying his own archive. He smashed hard drives containing machinima, mods, and video experiments: years of work. Naivy managed to recover much of the data, but his belief in its value had disappeared. I confess that when he asked me to erase everything he shared, out of the blue, including our correspondence, I hesitated. Not out of defiance, but because I wasn’t sure whether I was holding on to a record or to a refusal. I did keep the messages. Not as testimony, exactly, but as a trace of something that was already falling away.
Rewell’s work matters not for anticipating theoretical debates about games, platforms, or digital labour, but because it remained grounded in the lived realities of navigating those systems under duress. His practice wasn’t abstract, nor was it shaped in the context of art school critique. It emerged from experience (smuggled consoles, shared devices, pirated software) and tried to make sense of what those conditions demanded and revealed.Writing about someone who tried to dismantle their own archive leaves more questions than answers.
As a curator, I’m uncertain what deserves to be preserved and what should be allowed to fade. But looking away now would only echo the neglect that made his disappearance possible.Some of his files remain. A few images are still stored on servers. His name appears in scattered texts. What survives isn’t a legacy, but a collection of traces: gestures that speak to how precarious an artistic life can become when it refuses to conform.I don’t know what he needed. I only know I wasn’t there.
Ciao, Rewell.Matteo