What can role-playing games reveal about hidden histories and cultural identity? How can collective world-building challenge dominant narratives and inspire real-world change?
David Blandy’s art practice integrates video games, role-playing strategies, film, and installation, often working with communities to critically examine culture and identity. His work explores world-building as a tool for fostering new communities and reinterpreting environments. Through collaborative projects, Blandy engages participants in developing tabletop role-playing games that draw from local histories, collective experiences, and speculative design. Using game jams and active play, he employs gaming logic to challenge existing infrastructures, creating fictional landscapes that inspire real-world change and contribute to broader cultural and social discussions.
Join artist David Blandy for an evening of collective world-building through tabletop role-playing games. The session will feature:
Gathering Storm, a collaborative game that explores the impacts of colonial food production in a postcolonial sci-fi world. Players will add elements to a shared map, create characters using a streamlined card-based system, and respond to prompts that uncover hidden histories and present injustices.
The second game, Diachronic, takes players on a journey through time as they use a deck of Tarot cards to explore and document lost histories before they are erased. As an Envoy traveling into the past, participants will interpret scenes, collect artifacts, and create illustrated records of their discoveries. A tumbling block tower represents the site’s stability, which becomes increasingly fragile as the game progresses, mirroring the threat of erasure by a relentless Explorer seeking to extract and destroy cultural heritage. Through storytelling, drawing, and collaborative decision-making, players will shape unique narratives that challenge dominant historical perspectives.
Konstfrämjandet Stockholm collaborates with the Nordic Art Association (NKF), which supports networks and dialogue locally, nationally, and internationally, as well as runs an international residency program in Stockholm at Malongen.