Side Quest for the Real

Art, jeu & société (Art, games & society) is an art initiative that explores practices related to gaming in order to raise awareness and address contemporary issues. For its second edition, Side Quest for the Real examines society through the prism of LARP (live action role-playing) deployed by artists. Its hybrid programme combines creation, experimentation and theory to approach the complexity of our era of widespread crisis, in which rules and goals are questioned and perpetually called into games.

LARP refers to a form of participatory theatre without spectators, which aims to collectively construct temporary worlds or models of society. It also describes types of action, even activism, that challenge the entanglement between reality and fiction, aesthetics and politics. LARP thus contributes to renewed ways of understanding and producing social facts, where ambivalent strategies act like games that traverse the different dimensions of the common. In this sense, Side Quest for the Real invites us to discover, reflect and play together.

With: alfatih, Sara Bissen, Ryan Decker, Carina Erdmann & Steph Holl-Trieu & Lore D Selys, Loretta Fahrenholz, Gabriele Garavaglia, Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė, Hypernormalisa (Lisa Mayer) & Emil Adam, Lauren Huret & Maria Guță, Jean-Baptiste Janisset, Tom K Kemp, Andrea Khôra, Juliette Lizotte, lo.me, Sveta Mordovskaya, Bahar Noorizadeh, Susan Ploetz, Alex Quicho & Raw2.2, Random Kingdom, Anja Ripoll & Tristan Cubero, Jak Ritger, Jana Romanova, Jennifer Merlyn Scherler, Noura Tafeche & Tobia P. Bettoni. Curators: Christian Bili, Samuel Wagen-Magnon.

Abstract
Art, jeu & société is a curatorial proposal that explores artistic practices related to playing and gaming in order to develop social issues with emerging cultures. Games are considered as participants in aesthetic resolutions—making things tangible, putting them into practice—which address the symbolic and material conditions of the contemporary world.

For its second edition, Side Quest for the Real probes the social through the prism of LARP deployed by artists. Its hybrid programme combines creation, experimentation and theory to grasp the complexity of our era by exposing how fiction and reality inform each other with ambivalence.

The notion of play characterises a present that now seems defined by immediacy, post-history and hyperreality, where game mechanics supplant all context. The rules, goals and narratives, whether collective, conscious or unstable, are perpetually brought back into play. In this configuration and dynamic, where the logic of play leads to and drifts towards contingent futures, the intersections between art and play are conceived as critical points for dialectically addressing the social constructions and determinisms of increasingly artificial realities.

Mobilising concepts such as the egregore (emerging collective entity), the bleed (overflow, leakage between play and life) or the magic circle (ritualised boundaries of play), role-playing games reveal common ground between the works assembled in this edition. With a diversity of media and forms of interaction, they engage a material economy to activate the imagination. Role-playing thus resonates with contemporary modes of production where entertainment and creative work merge—reflecting a rationality in which self-invention and storytelling become vital performative and self-fulfilling activities.

LARP, a kind of open-stage theatre where each person plays a role, involves the collective construction of temporary and imaginary worlds, models of society and sociability. In the era of post-truth and hyperstition, LARP has come to describe forms of action, even activism, which, combining entertainment and engagement, simulation and training, challenge relationships with reality, between aesthetics and politics, materiality and virtuality. With the formation of imagined communities and prefigurative politics, composed of real-time actions or alternate realities, role-playing is part of new ways of understanding and producing social facts. With its temporalities marked by re-enactment, repetition and reappearances, LARP proves to be a crucial term for investigating a relationship with a troubled reality—between narratives and stories, technologies and magic, farces and tragedies—but also an open one.

The exhibition questions the conditions of participation, interactivity, immersion and their limits, in order to expose structures and logics of coexistence and interdependence. Bringing together art, play and society to highlight the artificial nature of the phenomena it considers and seeks to politicise, Side Quest for the Real questions the roles we play in constructing what we make real, in order to reclaim them in collective, viable and desirable ways to build society together.

Events
La table des possibles (LARP): December 3, 3pm
Carina Erdmann, Steph Holl-Trieu, Lore D Selys

Le Cinquième Feu (LARP): December 6, 3pm
Tom K Kemp

Max Pounder (performance): December 11–12
lo.me

Better Troll (LARP): December 13, 3pm
Jana Romanova

Entrainment Protocol 00100 (LARP): December 14, 12pm
Andrea Khôra

The Quale (Larp & Media Experiment): December 20, 10am
Susan Ploetz

Hades invites you to his Death Café: December 21, 12pm
Jennifer Merlyn Scherler