Beyond and from below: Rehearsing reparative futures in the VR roleplays of Cao Fei and Ana María Millán

Abstract

The rise of virtual reality games, films and social experiences in recent years has been accompanied by the promise of simulating utopian futures. The visions they conjure include limitless options for opening, exploring, and expanding new worlds. However, these tropes reproduce settler-colonial attitudes to space, time, and civilizational progress. They project the militarized and consumerist roles of neoliberal western societies into the future, while hiding their negative effects across past and present environments. In this article, I ask whether virtual worlds can be used to connect users with reparative futures. Looking at artworks by Colombian artist Ana María Millán and Chinese artist Cao Fei, I discuss how they intervene into existing virtual landscapes and aesthetics to question their modes of co-creation. I argue that they combine recontextualization, roleplay and rehearsal as forms of reparative practice. They resist narratives of exceptional authorship and agency in favor of pluralized approaches to the future. Rather than supporting the gamified erasure of existing worlds, these works hold space for loss, memory, and survival. By redistributing responsibility for harm from below and imaginations beyond the horizon of dominant visibility, these practices approach reparative futures.