Before I learned to draw, I was already building universes. With Lego, on paper, in video games, in tabletop RPGs — it was always about creating worlds that could be inhabited, systems that came alive when someone entered. Video games were never entertainment to me. They were the place where I learned that technology doesn’t imitate experience — it expands what’s possible to feel and do. Player 1 is the first time I bring this foundational territory into the white cube. Four interactive installations that use the body as interface: in STRIKE, gestures become energy attacks against light entities. In DRIFT, the body moves to dodge digital objects. In TRACE, the finger explores fifty years of history through a collection curated by Antonio Curti. In RUSH, hands execute under pressure in a vertical tower of four stacked CRTs, each screen a minigame that must be beaten against the clock.

The grammar is simple: eight verbs, one body. Attack, dodge, explore, execute. Run, shoot, drive, fight. There are no intermediate controls — no joystick, no buttons. The body is the control. This is not metaphor. It’s the literal reconfiguration of the relationship I learned in the 1990s, when my hand held a SNES and my eyes fixed on a 29-inch CRT. Here, the screen grows until it occupies the room. Gesture becomes visible. Speed, precision, the dance between intention and execution — everything that was encoded in button-pressing now unfolds in space. Each experience isolates a fundamental behavior from games and materializes it as choreography. It’s not nostalgia. It’s archaeology of the vibratile body — what was inscribed in me, and in an entire generation, from fifty years of playable culture.

The exhibition is structured as a double layer: Alex Mamed’s collection — seven-time Brazilian record holder, largest collection in the country — functions as a living archive of this history. Antonio selected 115 items from thousands, organized into five nuclei ranging from the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey to the 2024 PlayStation 5 Pro. Consoles, handhelds, experimental controllers, unique objects like the Divers 2000 helmet-television. This material is the historical ground. The four experiences I designed and directed are the contemporary translation: what those fifty years left as a mark on the body, transformed into live interaction. AYA Studio — Brígida on architecture, Raphael Minhoso on renders and RUSH development, Ana Clara on kiosk design, Leonardo on technical sourcing, Ihon on installation — is the productive structure that makes all this matter in space. I don’t hide the infrastructure. It’s part of the work. Showing how things are made is as important as what they are.

Player 1 is the most personal work I’ve ever done. Not because it’s autobiographical in a confessional sense, but because I finally managed to name where I come from as an artist. The 2012 light waterfall came from the same source as the SNES, the same place where the clay worlds and RPG campaigns came from. It took me fourteen years to understand that video games weren’t an influence — they were a medium. Now I can say: I’m an artist who works with games. Not as a theme, but as material. As a way of thinking about the body, perception, agency, time. Antonio saw this before I did. His curation gave me permission to occupy this territory without apologizing. The collection says: this history is legitimate. The experiences say: this is art. Together, we say: come in. You are Player 1.