Serpentine and Nowadays present David Blandy’s Alien Pastoral: The Strain at COP16 as part of Plant Lab: MOTH (More Than Human Rights).
Plant Lab: MOTH (More Than Human Rights) is a participatory design session that brings together people, plants, and the planet to imagine a greener future. This plant-led lab will include playing David Blandy’s new role-playing tabletop game Alien Pastoral: The Strain, first presented at Serpentine as part of the Infinite Ecologies Marathon.
Participants will receive tools for including nature in their boardrooms, delegations, and policymaking spaces. Supported by interactive works, this part-workshop, part-community round table will look at alternative models for how to centre the rights of nature and build a better world.
Alien Pastoral: The Strain follows the story of a biological research station, run by an Authority, as the scientists try to engineer a new strain to solve an existential problem. An adaptation of Blandy’s previous work Gathering Storm, Alien Pastoral: The Strain explores the strange and often blurred spaces between agriculture, technology and capitalism. Players design a research station together, with seedbeds, orchards and laboratories.
Experience how your relationships change with your environments in this open worlding game experience.
You do not need any prior role-playing game experience to participate.
Alien Pastoral: The Strain is a participatory event which involves complex themes, narratives and storytelling; including material around body horror, isolation, loss of autonomy and trauma.
The event by Nowadays also includes Maize Metabolics, an activation from WORKOVERTIME and A Tale Of Two Seeds from Atractor and Semantica.
Attendees are invited to participate in a guided practice of the common act of eating to encourage reflections over our own bodily, inter-bodily and inter-species metabolisms. Through making the act of eating strange for a moment, participants will make visible and felt the intrinsic and intimate interdependencies on what is typically taken for granted. This act of commemoration will show gratitude for vegetal life that nourishes us and that we must nourish in turn.
Louise Carver and Jamie Allen, as WORKOVERTIME, are operative in art, design and political ecological inquiry. Carver is a human geographer working in a culturally driven policy change; Allen is an artist-researcher interested in media, technology, and their ecological interconnections.
About
David Blandy (he/him) is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas as diverse as ecology, history and science to arenas of play, he makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again.
He searches for meaning in cultural life, an expanded form for auto-anthropology, sifting through multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives, Blandy weaves poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. Perhaps it’s hubris, but he wants to build complex stories that sketch out a future of interdependence, through visual poetry and immersive play.
Blandy is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London. His films are distributed by LUX, London.
He has exhibited & performed at venues nationally and worldwide, with solo shows at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Towner Gallery, Eastbourne; Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea; The Baltic, Gateshead; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Spike Island, Bristol; The Exchange, Newlyn; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany. Blandy has also exhibited in museums internationally including at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Art Tower Mito, Tokyo; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki; Tate Modern, London; & MoMA PS1, New York.
Alongside writer & publisher Jamie Sutcliffe & curator Rebecca Edwards, Blandy curated “Areas Of Effect: Planar Systems, Critical Roles, and Gaming Imaginaries”, A symposium and live play session at Arebyte London. He also has a collaborative joint practice with artist Larry Achiampong. Genetic Automata, at Wellcome Collection was their first museum exhibition as a duo.
Nowadays is a social enterprise fighting for urban nature. We provide resources, educational content, programmes, and workshops to close the nature gap, build cyber tools to make growing accessible and fun, and grow pockets of nature in streets and neighbourhoods.
Kalpana Arias is a guerrilla gardener, technologist, food grower, writer, speaker and the founder of Nowadays On Earth, a social enterprise fighting for urban nature. Alongside Nowadays, Kalpana campaigns for the right to grow and nature rights, has been researching technological ecologies for over 7 years, delivered a global TED talk, spoken at the United Nations, featured on Evening Standard’s 30 under 30 list of Climate Activists On A Mission To Save London and Vogue, and is a trustee for GROW charity. Kalpana is currently an environmental consultant for corporations and governments and works with leading charities, institutions, brands and grassroots change-makers.