June 2024
I have employed critical play during my secondment at Van Abbemuseum as an approach to storytelling. More precisely, I used a board game entitled ‘Explore the Trail: Narrations Across Palestine’, designed in collaboration with students in a graduate seminar I teach at the Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus. We played the game with young migrants and members of the Palestinian solidarity groups in Rotterdam and Eindhoven. The action involves the gamification of solidarity. It expands the pedagogic strategies into the networks of civil society. It translates the idea of the Palestinian conflict and Israeli occupation into tangible elements that relate to the fractured Palestinian landscape in the West Bank. The game invites people who are curious about Palestine and do not know how to get involved due to the polarization of the society. It offers a means to bring together various memories and narratives of the audience regarding Palestine and other relevant regions worldwide.
(Explore the Trails: Narrations Across Palestine, performed in Rotterdam and Eindhoven, excerpt from my diary, June 2024)
“It is not the stories that are important but the framework that encourages people to tell them, the environment that makes them feel safe to narrate.
The board game “Explore the Trail: Narrations Across Palestine” provides such a framework. The game’s mechanics keep a dynamic yet fragile balance between playing the game and storytelling. Storytelling is a currency in playing the game. When the fragile balance is disturbed by playing, storytelling doesn’t have such a weight in the play unfolding. The ‘co-hikers’, the name of the game players, rush to reach their destination before they run out of their designated game rounds. The fragile balance may additionally be disturbed when one storytelling invites the other and the other and the other. It is contagious. Yet, necessary to turn an individual right of the game into a collective one.
I don’t record the stories. I take a few notes during play. I write true fiction stories out of the co-hikers’ narratives. I am listening. I am playing too. I am telling stories. I feel part of the action. They feel that too.
I only take a few photos. I don’t want to make the ‘co-hikers’ feel objects of study. They probably feel so at the beginning of the game. Yet they forget along the way. They often forget is a game when they rush to save their comrade co-hiker trapped in a military zone, or behind a roadblock. They endlessly discuss how to bypass the roadblock. Should they add a landscape -board square piece- from this side or the opposite one? They count their moves to the nearest exit: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. They have just thrown two dice: 3 with a cube one with six numbers and 4 with a pyramid with four numbers. They add a ‘desert’ landscape next to a ‘village’ one. They spot the position in the ‘desert’ where they can flip a card from the cards’ stack. Who knows! They may pick one that suits their cause.
“What is more important, the storytelling, the play, the game design or the impact of playing?” a colleague asks me, while drinking a beer after the end of the two play sessions in which he participated.
“All!”, I answer.”
Images, courtesy of S. Stratis, 2024