Speculative Sports Day

This workshop involves creating and playing games that explore liberatory ways of being together. It includes worldbuilding, game design, and game play. We’ll create speculative games that involve collective dreaming, moving, divinating, experimenting, learning, playing, caring, imagining and transforming.

We hack school Sport Days, Olympic games, and military strategy board games. We recognise the colonial, ableist, carceral and military roots of many contemporary games and sports. Instead, we research other histories, myths, and ecologies. We’re interested in the historical overlap of divination rituals with games. How can games open up questions, play with possibilities, weave chance with strategy, and give us space for inclusive, messy and hopeful experimentation?

We come to this from anarchist abolitionist perspectives. What games can we create that don’t use logics of carcerality, punitive, authority, borders, competition? Also, we recognise the violence of Western discourses of the body, which are ableist, racist, colonial, and sexist. We’re inspired by the work of Disability Justice organizers, Generative Somatics, and posthumanist philosophers – how can we find other, non-normalizing ways to relate to our bodies? We don’t position ourselves as experts – we’re excited to co-create and learn from others.

We are inspired by Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley, kabbalistic divination grids, Frances Lingard’s ‘tender spots in hard code’, astragalomancy, Donna Haraway on Navajo string figures, Theatre of the Oppressed, Peter Greenaway’s ‘Drowning by Numbers’ and pre-Christian English folk traditions, to name a few.

1. collective worldbuilding; thinking through our shared liberatory values. This includes dreaming and scheming, but also a commitment to care, understanding each other boundaries, etc
2. game design! We’ve found 3 games is a good starting point. We particularly enjoyed spending a bit of time bodging together tools, costumes and props.
3. the actual gameplay! The games can morph and develop as they’re played.

Selby, Elia, Juliette and Pernilla holding hands with their eyes closed and walking in the grass while Michael is floating above a trampolin, the house of the rabbits is in the background

• duration: around 6 hours - still figuring out how to break this up. suggestions welcome!
• number of participants: any!
• materials / tools: whatever! (Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Octavia's Brood – ‘technology is the brilliance of making something out of anything, of making what we need out of what we had’ )
• what do participants need to prepare: it would be good to think of some games and sports you played as a child. feel free to bring bits of fabric, paints, lucky mascots, etc

Sade (aka EXICON) is a multidisplinary artist, radical coder and video game designer. They have recently led workshops on anarchist chatbot design for generative worldbuilding. They design immersive club infrastructure for queer collectives SNOG and Conqueer.

Sid is a prisoner solidarity organiser + abolitionist educator. They facilitate the Transformative Justice Reading Group, and a peer support group for trans and non-binary SV survivors. They have lived in anarchist squats and protest camp treehouses.

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  Sid and Sade, 2 humans, introducing the workshop to a circle of humans sitting on the floor, wooden benches are in the background, in the center of the cirlce, large paper sheets and colourful pens

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  humans sitting on the floor around big sheets of paper and chatting about games

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  a large piece of fabric painted with a grid with inscriptions to randomize the process of creating speculative games

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  Sade (an adult human) and Elia (a child human with) looking at the fabric with the grid, other humans around are looking at the grid

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  humans playing 1,2,3 soleil / grandmother's footsteps / Annemaria koekoek, Elia is looking back, the other humans are freezing

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  Juliette, a human, is kneeling on a piece of fabric in the grass looking at the camera while shuffling diverse cards

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  the ground is with grass, Elia plays with a ball, Michael is on a trampoline skipping the rope, Karl is watching, Selby is thinking, Lindsey is holding a notebook, Sade is grabing a net, in the middle is the piece of fabric with the grid

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  Sid laying on the fabric grid

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  a group of humans playing an imagined game, some have closed eyes, some not, one person is wearing a mask, another has a strange headpiece. This game was called Moon Moo Cow.

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  Happy humans playing Moon Moo Cow