We are delighted to announce that Gabriella Davies (alumni 2020) is the fifth recipient of our funded, two-month Digital Residency.
"I’m super stoked to receive the opportunity to be New Contemporaries Digital resident this summer. It’s only recently that I’ve really come to appreciate the formative role digital technologies have played in my life and I’m really excited to have the chance to really dig into what they mean to me. Growing up in the late 90s/early 00s, the first place I really got to explore my gender (as a top-secret baby trans girl) was the hand-me-down video games from my better- off cousins. I’ll be spending the residency deep-diving some of my fave games from this period, exploring what they symbolised for me in terms of gender, and mining their soundtracks for samples for some beats to wrap things up."
Gabriella Davies
Gabriella Davies is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work trades in sentimentality and nostalgia. Informed by her lived experience as a trans woman, she allows her interests to wander freely and guide her practice rather than adhering rigidly to particular conceptual or material frameworks. The result is an ever-evolving synthesis of cultural reference expressed primarily through film, sound, and installation with a deeply personal inflection. Gabriella is a member of Babeworld and holds an MA in Contemporary Art Practice. Recent shows include ‘The Voices of a Tempest’ at Somerset House Studios with Babeworld and ‘Blue Italian’ at Forth.
These two short songs represent a summer spent (mostly) inside; a summer spent researching and re searching; a summer spent on screens. In my head I’m affectionately calling them ‘Trash Beats to Transition To’ - they’re messy, rough round the edges, not exactly where I want them to be but not exactly not - I made them because I wanted to figure out how to contextualise my practice in relation to my transness and how I could go about making something that embraced it but could also expand beyond it and encompass more of me and my interests, but also I just wanted to try something new.
Glitsch:
Girls!:
I love you, Nina Williams
So last time I wrote about Pokémon Crystal right? OMG you haven’t read it?? Go check it out RIGHT. THIS. SECOND. - [scroll to read below] - tl;dr? The only thing you really need to know for the sake of the following is that I’m pretty sure that Pokémon crystal was the centrepiece of an international conspiracy by the good people at Game Freak in collaboration with the transglobal trans illuminati to initiate the self-actualisation of an entire generation of baby transeses. Now, when I wrote that last piece I was half-joking based off of my own experience growing up at the intersection of trans and nerd, a couple of articles discussing its relevance to trans people of a certain age, and a couple of tweets that basically said ‘OoH sPaRkLy, HoW qUeEr!’. I know that I sound unsubstantiated - and that’s defo somewhat true - but British mainstream media publishes transphobic propaganda based off of less on the daily, so yeah…
Anyway, before I go off on the wrong tangent: My conviction has since become increasingly serious, and now extends beyond the specific example that is Pokémon Crystal to the whole wider gaming industry. ‘Why?’ you may ask. Well allow me to direct your attention to exhibit A (see image below) - on the left you’ll see a box of estradiol valerate as regularly prescribed to yours truly since ~2019 - take note of the prominent blue swirl logo in the middle. To the right of that you’ll see the logo for Sega’s final entry into the video game home console market, the Dreamcast - again, the same blue swirl. Coincidence? I think not! (actually tho, I promise I’m fine and totally aware this is absolutely 100% coincidental xx).
Nina Williams was my first model of femininity, for me she was the absolute star of the PS2 era Tekken roster. For those of you not in the know, Tekken is an ongoing series of fighting games, and Nina was a classic bombshell femme fatale from a family of contract killers. Nina is the highest of high femme - big tits, high heels, bare flesh, figure hugging catsuits - a world away from the low-key, low femme lesbian fantasy adult me typically presents, but as a closeted kid Nina, was everything I wanted to be - aesthetically speaking at least. Nina might be put together, but her personal life is a mess: When she’s not engaged in petty rivalries with her younger sister, Anna, or the subject of human experiments by shady financial conglomerates, she is (or at least was in the Tekken of my youth) a 40-year-old 26-year-old, trying to restore memories lost to amnesia. I can’t lie, I don’t know how much aloof teenage boymode me cared about Nina’s narrative but professional transsexual adult me revisiting it can’t help but relate to someone out of step with her physical age with absolutely no moral compass trying to figure herself out - no, I won’t elaborate x
All images: Courtesy Gabi Davies
I remember it like it was yesterday - the year was 2001, I was ~10 years old, it was a new millennium full of possibilities. In my hand was the absolute peak of game cartridge design, that's right, you know exactly what I’m talking about, it’s Pokémon Crystal. You can’t tell me this game was not part of a massive global conspiracy by a shadowy trans illuminati to crack the eggs of the next generation of baby transeses; this shit was baby blue, translucent, glittery - you couldn’t make it up, she was serving C*NT. What’s more, upon starting a new game it asked the single most important question I think I might ever have been asked: Are you a boy? Or are you a girl? I don’t think I can adequately communicate the gravity this particular question held for lil ~10 year old Gabi, shit, it hadn’t ever even occurred to me that that could be an option before; for one thing I was ~10, and to top that off it was 2001 (section 28 was literally still in force!!), trans people might as well have not existed as far as I was concerned (which was probs the point). Yes, there were defo games where you could play female characters that preceded this but this was different: This was you being asked very directly what you were - inside this c*nty little cartridge was your world, centered around you. I can’t remember really having had a clearer sense of myself before then. It was a moment. Also, I’m certainly not the first person to write about this - if you want a more heartfelt and in depth take by someone whose gender was also transed by Pokémon Crystal then go check out this article by Anya L. Archer HERE which I found when I googled this to decide if my silly little trans illuminati theory was even remotely realistic (spoiler……it is xx). Archer makes a really great point about how important it was that Pokémon was this huge global phenomenon and how significant it felt to feel seen within that even when it wasn’t likely the developers’ intention.
Looking back now, what really stands out about it to me is that it asked for your gender, you answered, and that was that - none of the explanations or attempts to justify that are typically expected of trans people irl - from there on it was just a matter of fact, isn’t that really fucking cool?? You just get to exist and off you trot! Crazy stuff… Anyway that was it for me, not only was my early interest in video games solidified into a full on obsession but I was also playing female characters wherever possible in search of that same feeling Pokémon Crystal had given me. My dad hated it - He’s the type who’s of the mind that kids should be outside and active so he really didn’t appreciate his kid wanting to spend all their time inside playing video games. Fortunately he was so wound up about that he didn’t even notice I was always playing a woman/girl. Later, when I started my transition, I would wind him up by trying to convince him I wanted to be named Crystal (a name he also hated and for some reason associated specifically with trans people) and I can’t help but appreciate when things come full circle like that.
All images: Courtesy Gabi Davies
