Plum Road Tea Dream, Samuel Baidoo
Ctrl + Shift + Del:
Reclaiming Digital Space through Speculative Video Games
Opening: 25.03.2026 7-10 PM
Exhibition Duration: 26.03.2026 - 08.05.2026
Participating Artists: Samuel Baidoo, Kyriaki Goni and Earshot
Curated by: Joanna Zabielska
Ctrl + Shift + Del is a command to delete. But what if it became a command to reset?
The exhibition explores this question through speculative video games that reclaim digital spaces as sites of care, memory, and resistance. Three artistic positions offer distinct responses to overlapping crises—occupation, imperialist violence, capitalism, overtourism, climate collapse—not by escaping them, but by reprogramming their structures.
What connects the works is an understanding of land not only as soil or territory, but as a collective experience of place. From this starting point, the artists use video games to connect the individual and the societal through sanctuaries, simulations, and archives. Sanctuaries emerge as virtual spaces where queer BIPOC communities share pain, joy, and grief. Simulations advocate for the sonic self-determination of occupied communities. Archives preserve ancestral practices of land care and rural knowledge—traditions threatened by standardization, overtourism, and extraction. Across each mode, the objective is twofold: to contest and to preserve.
Gameplay is built around acts of tenderness and testimony. Wandering and encountering become archaeological methods: players experience fragments of erased neighborhoods, suppressed soundscapes, and damaged ecosystems. To be with, to listen, to nurture—these are acts of resistance and resilience that open space for healing. In these worlds, listening replaces conquering, and nurturing replaces accumulating. The game mechanics resist dominant logics of competition and control, proposing instead reciprocity, kinship, and collective memory.
These worlds intertwine memory, imagination, and resilience, transforming gameplay into a poetic act of survival and care. Rather than escaping contemporary crises, Ctrl + Shift + Del confronts them by attempting to reprogram their underlying structures. To press these keys is not to delete, but to reset: inherited systems of violence, extraction, and erasure. In doing so, the exhibition reveals artistic video games as cultural tools for preserving endangered lifeworlds, amplifying marginalized voices, and prototyping more just and caring futures. They become speculative laboratories where society can be reimagined.
PUBLIC PROGRAM
PUBLIC PROGRAM
Vernissage
25.03.2026 | 7-10 PM
Connect & Discuss
15.04.2026 | 6-8 PM
Collective Gaming Session & Discussion
DigitEyes – Speculative Fictions in the Metaverse
22.04.2026 | 5-8 PM
Workshop
Performance by Samuel Baidoo
29.04.2026 | 7-8 PM
Performance
Finissage
08.05.2026 | 7-10 PM
The exhibition and Public Programme are supported by MA7, BMWKMS and 15. District