Concept and moderation: Aflatih, Carina Erdmann, Mauro Hertig and Bernard Vienat

What is the workshop?

World Building is a 4-hour workshop that is part of a series of sustainability salons organized by ABA and the Swiss Embassy in Berlin. This workshop is a starting point in the creation of a traveling exhibition that links role-playing games and contemporary art exhibitions, allowing visitors to step into the shoes of another character through the works. The exhibition and the game explore the gap between collective utility and financial remuneration of work and invite us to collectively reflect on the conditions in which we work to produce goods and knowledge.

What are we doing?

The workshop will begin with a brief introduction to Larping as a method for embodying and envisioning alternative futures. Next, participants will engage in a character creation session with a series of selected artworks and game mechanics. The selected artworks are seen as starting points for questioning the motivations that drive people to work, while highlighting judgments about the different types of tasks that are necessary or not for a well-functioning society. They are also triggers that allow participants to be at the center of the viewing experience by creating a new character of their own.

LARP?

To act against the difficulty of envisioning a future different from the past, role-playing seeks to open up to specified forms of knowledge, to reconnect with our sensual and social bodies and to rethink the foundations of our social actions. Revisiting a world means looking at it again and again, from a new perspective. Worlding is therefore also the rearrangement of the world: it forces us to rethink our relationship with the environment and our own role within it.