Live event with David Blandy: Gathering Storms: Origins
Monday 13 November / 6:30-8pm

Places are limited, please reserve a ticket by emailing ftw at forthewin.ch

As part of The Seashore of Endless Worlds, Art & jeux de société
Venue: Le Commun, Building J, 1st & 2nd floor, Rue des Vieux-Grenadiers 10, 1205 Geneva, Switzerland

Curated by FTW: Christian Bili & Samuel Wagen-Magnon

Exhibition dates: 1- 22 November 2023
Open Mon- Sun, 12 -6pm

Symposium: From November 20 to 21

Gathering Storm: Origins, David Blandy, 2023

Gathering Storm: Origins by David Blandy considers the international power dynamics that reach out from Geneva through microcosm, as players devise a single extra-terrestrial community that models different modes of power and control. Players create a community together through collaborative map-making and story-telling, as random prompts take them through a story that evolves towards a radical shift in control. The game facilitates a tale of resistance and making change, told through a culture based around one strange alien fruit. 

Several of the events described in the game are inspired by incidents in which Geneva-based corporations are involved. The writing and worlding takes on the language of Mary Shelley's Geneva-based Frankenstein. 

Gathering Storm: Origins was developed for The Seashore of Endless Worlds. Art & jeux de société, Le Commun, Geneva, November 2023. With thanks to Sébastien Guex, Christian Bili and Samuel Wagen Magnon.

Gathering Storm, a collaborative worldbuilding game was first created whilst the artist was on a residency at Delfina Foundation, London as part of The Politics of Food: Season 5 in 2022, supported by Gaia Art Foundation.

“This is the time of feeding,

A steady glut

Of fruit and labour

That has made them drowzy

And complacent.

The store grows,

Of their alien fruit

While the others

Hear whispers

Of a reckoning.

A different time is coming.

But how will the Authority fall?”