2023 Berlin
Commons: The Game Show is a participatory art project that suggests the speculative formation of a Commons on an urban wasteland as the premise for a game show. Residing on the intersection of public art, art film and reality television, it explores the challenges of founding and maintaining a communal resource through a series of participatory mirco-LARP scenarios. The project playfully appropriates the format of a reality TV game show as a method to bring the often overlooked notion of conflict to the foreground in the discourse on Commoning. However, conflict does not arise from the players competing against each other, but from the inevitable contradictions between self-interest and common good. Set on an urban wasteland in Berlin-Marzahn, participants enact characters modelled after real-life stakeholders from the neighbourhood, and are confronted with themes, problems and challenges that are derived directly from the local physical and social context, such as contradicting usages, conflicting visions of the future of the Commons, interpersonal conflicts or the wasteland’s integral limitations. Conceptualised not as an educational tool but as an artistic experiment, the game does not have predetermined outcomes. Instead, the project acknowledges the generative potential of openly and respectfully contesting or debating different conflicting ideas, values and interests within an artificial environment.
Commons: The Game Show MARZAHN is funded by the One and Two Year Festivals and Series programme of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.
artists: Carina Erdmann, Steph Holl-Treu, Elbe Trakal, director of photography: Edgard Berendsen, participants: Mohammad Aswad, Isabelle Bertram, Susanne Boden, Daniel Breidenstein, Lulu Dombois, Nina Fuchs, Janine Reiss, Karin Schwarz, Rainer Tolle
Lianne Mol 