Artists invite strangers to build a society through a game at Los Angeles residency

Two artists are asking strangers to sit down together and design a society from scratch through a structured game, something that feels closer to Diplomacy or Dungeons and Dragons than to a traditional art workshop.

The artists Mims and Mười are presenting the project Marooning Bodies: Prototype as Prophecy at the Feminist Center for Creative Work through April 18, as part of a residency. Mims is the founder and director of Marooning Bodies, and Mười is its creative director.

Mims, in an interview with Urgent Matter, said she was not inspired by those particular games and admitted she is “actually not a big game player.”

“I really approached designing from a community organizing perspective,” she said. “How do we get people's minds and bodies in a space that feels playful? How do we facilitate them through difficult conversations? How do we really give people the opportunity to massage their imaginations together?”

Mims said the artists worked with game designers Mathew Coopilton and Christina Lelon, and that the team was most inspired by the 2013 tabletop role-playing game The Quiet Year by Avery Alder—a map-building game in which players “define the struggles of a community living after the collapse of civilization.”

Mười told Urgent Matter that the game draws on the history of maroon communities—settlements formed by enslaved Africans who escaped slavery—as well as speculative storytelling, body-based healing practices, and ideas drawn from nature.

“The game very directly asks players to build community systems from scratch,” Mười said. “A key feature of the game is that we tell players there is no ‘right’ or ‘final’ answer, there are only ideas to explore with each other. This opens up a lot of possibilities in people's minds, and it has been a deep pleasure to hold the resulting ideas.”

The residency grows out of a longer-term project by the duo called Marooning Bodies. Gameplay generates what the artists call “an archive of future relics from a speculative world” —like a story, song, dance or poem — made by the players through the guidance of the game’s prompts.

During the residency, Mims and Mười will host two public Marooning Bodies gameplay sessions at the art center that will generate new material for the archive in real time, with the first on March 14.

Players are grouped in teams of up to six. Each group receives a box filled with materials: a “Future Histories” textbook, cards, dice, a scent vial and colored pencils.