Dive into video games reimagined by digital art in this garden for Nuit Blanche 2026.

When the virtual makes its way into the heart of Paris's natural landscape. From Saturday, June 6 to Sunday, June 7, 2026, the Nuit Blanche is set to make Paris and its metropolitan area pulse for one magical and entirely free night. If museums and the churches are often crowded, the event also shines for its ability to uncover offbeat and little-known spots.

That’s the case with Garden of Traverses, a verdant oasis tucked away in the 18th arrondissement, which will become the stage for an unprecedented and captivating artistic encounter centered on geek culture and video games.

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For Parisians on the hunt for secret spots, Jardin des Traverses is a standout find. Set along the old rails of the legendary Petite Ceinture, this community garden embodies a slice of alternative, eco-friendly Paris. With its air of suspended calm, wild grasses, and wooden installations, the place serves up a bucolic interlude far from the bustle of the big boulevards.

Letting this raw, vegetal setting converse with the screens, the pixels and the virtual realms of digital art creates a striking visual contrast that alone is worth the trip. For this Nuit Blanche, the garden teams up with two avant-garde collectives: Fantasia Malware and Distraction. Together, they take over the site's green corners to offer a true open-air exhibition that explores video games as an artistic, political and intimate medium.

Artists use code and pixels to tell deep stories, social critiques, or autobiographical narratives. Through playable installations, film screenings, and interactive experiences, audiences are invited to pick up the controllers and wander among bold works that probe our relationship to virtual spaces, memory, and our own digital ghosts.

• Distraction / Fantasia Malware / All-Nighter — Jardin des Traverses
  From Saturday, June 6, 2026 to Sunday, June 7, 2026: Saturday from 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM
  

  Video, Installation, Performance, Music, Exhibition, Video Game
  As part of Nuit Blanche, the Jardin des Traverses hosts a meeting between two collectives that treat video games as an artistic medium: Fantasia Malware, based in Berlin, and Distraction, a Parisian collective. Through playable installations, films, and performances, their practices probe the narrative forms of videogames, virtual worlds, and the stories they produce, straddling fiction, autobiography, and social critique.

  The exhibition gathers several works.

  Chevalhalla (Florie Souday, 2026) plunges audiences into a purgatory populated by horses drawn from video games. Players inhabit a forgotten mount and traverse a world where equines from different universes coexist, adopting the viewpoint of these essential yet often overlooked companions.

  Into the Heavens follows two clowns as they try to escape an oppressive authority figure, while Landlords traces a life through five owners, blending visual poetry with a critique of the reproduction of capital. The Life of Saint Fiona Bianco Xena is an interactive piece where a woman’s story shifts with the gaze, questioning the making of public narratives.

  Several projects explore memory, ruins, and ghost spaces. Where Do Dead Malls Go? invites exploration of an abandoned mall inspired by PlayStation 1 aesthetics, mixing urban exploration, fascination with contemporary ruins, and reflection on late-capitalism’s decline. Biskra Palms builds a fictional space from a California park inspired by an Algerian oasis, weaving family memory, migration, mourning, and mirage. Rayon Vert is an interactive writing experience where the player becomes the apparent author of a text they do not fully control, probing responsibility and attachment.

  Finally, The unraptured birds dive in the pacific blue forever, a film made from The Sims 2, delves into aging, death, and the persistence of characters after their disappearance, in a contemplative atmosphere drawn from a digital paradise.
  Together, the exhibition treats video games as spaces of creation, memory, and projection—capable of hosting intimate, political, and speculative narratives, where virtual worlds become inhabited by our contemporary ghosts.