Do you think you have the power to protect others?
What gives you this power?
Are you excited to hold the gun?
Will the gun make you feel powerful?
All they do is let you take power from others…

Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley’s exhibition, SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE, uses the artist’s recent series of DOTCOM works, blacktransarchive.com, blacktransair.com and blacktranssea.com as a starting point for furthering research on Archiving the black trans experience via interactivity and storytelling. The exhibition encompasses a new body of work that positions gaming at the forefront of ideas surrounding action, inaction, relation and archiving experience.

In SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE, this methodology takes shape as an immersive point-and-shoot style arcade game asking visitors to question how their choices and actions (or inactions) affect others directly. The game uses the interactions of those who play it to recentre their understanding of responsibility; challenging them to see if their sense of when to act and when not to act is sustainable for black trans people.