La Fabric’Art-thérapie

Canal Royal - TraceS, Journey to the Heart of Struggles

Exhibition

From 21 to 31 August

With Canal Royal, all forms of creativity are invited to the Crac, through several projects devised to promote and broaden the reach of the Occitanie region’s art scene. Four projects are presented upstairs at the Crac all summer long.

La Fabric’Art-thérapie offers you a chance to play the first three episodes of the video game TraceS, created by Isabelle S. D. Sentis and Paulette.

By manipulating an arcade machine designed for the occasion, you’ll travel from the 1980s to the 2050s to explore archives, current events, and the future of mobilisations in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Mixing investigations, street demonstrations, and risk reduction/prevention tools, the video game becomes an interactive tool helping preserve and transmit the multiple and plural stories of LGBTQ+ communities, sex workers, and drug users.
Because telling and sharing these fragile stories, from the cities of Montpellier, of Nîmes and elsewhere, is also a way to continue the fight.

This game was created with Bitsy, an easy-to-use open-source game editor based on pixel art, and installed in an arcade console that recycles old components in a permacomputing spirit. The use of these tools accessible to anyone is a way to tell you that if you wish, you can create video games yourself.
The posters adorning the space were created by graphic designer Roxanne Maillet. On the walls she has also placed some slogans from the fight against HIV/AIDS, including “undetectable=untransmittable”, written as big as possible, since it can never be repeated enough that an HIV-positive person who has an undetectable viral load cannot transmit the virus.