alien pastoral: The Strain, 2024
David Blandy’s new tabletop role-playing game, Alien Pastoral: The Strain.
Commissioned by Serpentine Gallery as part of the Infinite Ecologies Marathon.
Alien Pastoral: The Strain centres on 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, this game explores the strange and often blurred spaces between agriculture, technology and capitalism. Players collaboratively design a research station complete with seedbeds, orchards and laboratories to experience how relationships change with their environments in this open worlding game experience. A solo play version is also included.
A special edition of the game as a set of playing cards has been commissioned.
Alien Pastoral: The Strain involves complex themes, narratives and storytelling; including material around body horror, isolation, loss of autonomy and trauma.
Curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, Head of Ecologies, and Daisy Gould, Assistant Curator, Live Programmes. Produced by Isobel Peyton-Jones, Producer.
Images: David Blandy, Alien Pastoral: The Strain, 2024, playtesting session. Presented as part of the Infinite Ecologies Marathon. The Magazine, Serpentine, September 2024. Photo by Talie Rose Eigeland. Courtesy the artist and Serpentine.
The Infinite Ecologies Marathon is a long durational project that looks at the world-building potential of culture in the face of ecological destruction. Committing to working towards planetary thriving, this interdisciplinary series centres artist-led reimaginings for environmental action.
Ecologies is Serpentine’s new interdisciplinary department, focusing on developing a holistic, flexible and adaptive approach to embedding environmental purpose throughout Serpentine’s programmes, infrastructure and networks. Our mission is to place culture at the heart of environmental efforts, demonstrating how environmental commitment can guide the cultural sector. Ecologies was born from the learnings of the General Ecology project and Back to Earth.
Seeds: An event with artists David Blandy, Exodus Crooks, Lucia Pizzani and Jumana Manna, who were invited to work with chef Moonhyung Lee from Silo, London.
Audiences were invited to join Blandy in an immersive experience as he demonstrated his new tabletop role-playing card game, Alien Pastoral: The Strain. This worlding game delves into the intriguing and often blurred intersections of agriculture, technology, and capitalism. The audience become involved in a race to engineer a new plant strain within a biological research station, amongst seedbeds, orchards, and laboratories, as the taste and texture of food becomes integral to a journey through an improvised narrative, and asks, “how do we embrace the change that is necessary for us all to survive?” The game challenges us to discover the resilience of both the seeds we cultivate and ourselves in this complex and dynamic world.
Seeds, was an extended lunchtime programme addressing worlding through the lens of ecology, part of the Infinite Ecologies Marathon.
Continuing the legacy of The Magazine Sessions, Seeds delves into the multifaceted significance of seeds as vehicles for world building. Beyond their role in food production, seeds carry history, memory and serve as potent metaphors for growth, ideas and exchange.
This extended lunchtime series aims to create space to discuss the complex narratives embedded within seeds and their ecological and imaginative potential. Seeds invites participants to envision new commons and methods of knowledge exchange through the embodied experience of communal eating, sharing dishes created in close collaboration with the artists. We invite diners to engage with seeds as nourishment and a catalyst for critical dialogue.
Seeds facilitated four artist-led activations at a communal table to explore the revolutionary potential of food in reshaping our relationships to our environments and each other. The participating artists, David Blandy, Exodus Crooks, Lucia Pizzani and Jumana Manna, were invited to work with chef Moonhyung Lee, Sous Chef at the world’s first zero-waste restaurant, Silo, to develop dishes to complement their contributions. Remaining committed to Serpentine’s artist-led approach and the idea that knowledge can be produced and consumed in manifold ways, audiences enjoyed these dishes during the artist presentations, ingesting not only information but food in live activations that remove the mind/body barrier. The artists in Seeds explored some of the many methods of world-building, and food is appreciated as a means of collectivity, taking care of each other and sharing, as well as a means of consuming knowledge to imagine new futures.
