Upstream Gallery is pleased to participate in NAP+ 2026 with a solo presentation by Lucas Lugarinho: DEVROOM: Museum.

Lucas Lugarinho (1992 – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) works between video game design and painting, sampling disparate media ecosystems into counter-colonial narratives that explore both mediums' shared history as vehicles for ideology and desire.

ABOUT DEVROOM: MUSEUM

A Development Room (DEVROOM, Debug Room or Test Stage) is a video game environment where specific aspects of a game are tested or archived mid-development, often kept inaccessible from players without cheating codes or glitches. Within said spaces, the internal logic of a game’s design is laid bare, unveiling its world as a confluence of choices and ideologies.

In the game industry, Museums became a recurring type of DEVROOM that documents game systems, shaders (programs that dictate the way digital objects are rendered on-screen) and other assets as a way to test their mutual interactions.

By emulating said institutions as a means to enhance and optimize their work pipelines, we can infer that game companies' hidden Museums essentially reenact Modernity’s processes of traditional Museums, ‘capturing’, ‘abstracting’ and ‘showing’ reality for similar purposes of shaping the world around it.

In order to explore the emergent relations between Modernity’s Museums and its Debug counterparts, DEVROOM: Museum presents an installative circuit consisting of a painting and a playable video game interconnected via a webcam feed. The painting, composed as a collage of various texture types, wraps itself around the digital space when live mapped by the webcam: displaying a caricature of a traditional dutch bourgeoisie house turned into a Museum (loosely inspired by the Mauritshaus Museum in the Hague, Netherlands).

While attending to either or both pictures (video game and painting), one’s presence and agency both disrupts and accelerates this circuit, revealing the innerworks of video game oriented 3D modelling as a fragile kaleidoscope of images rendering processes of abstraction and reconfiguration in realtime. By doing so, the installation proposes this virtual Museum as a shadow of its original concept: reminding us that behind its mission for ‘cultural enrichment’, the social processes that enabled the existence of Museums have often been related to the colonial drive for conquering, subjugating and assimilating different cultures throughout History.

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NAP+ 2026
17- 20 September
Centrale Markthal Amsterdam