Our place, No place, 2025

Our Place, No Place is a tabletop role-playing game by David Blandy, (in collaboration with Dr Jo Lindsey Walton) that helps us to consider speculative worlding and emancipatory gaming. Participants draw a map and then step into the lives of characters who inhabit it. Our space, 200 years in the future, is no longer abstract, but an imaginatively lived reality. The game insists we will survive these traumas, but asks what will life then be like, in this more collaborative world?

Influenced by Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year, Ursula Le Guin’s The Disposessed, Octavia Butler’s Parable of The Sower and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time.

Our Place No Place is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

With thanks to everyone at VEX Spoken Word Collective, Isle of Wight.

Additionally the publication is made possible with the generous support of School of Media, Arts & Humanities,
University of Sussex

Created for Brent Biennial 2025 : Bones, stones and calling the four elements, curated by Annie Jael Kwan.

Dr Jo Lindsey Walton is Principal Research Fellow in Arts, Climate & Technology (Media and Film), University of Sussex

Play Through This – A Panel discussion about speculative worlding and emancipatory gaming with David Blandy and Laurie O'Connel, Samuel Clarice Mui Shen Ern, and Eryk Sawicki for Brent Biennial 2025 : Bones, stones and calling the four elements, curated by Annie Jael Kwan

In this discussion we considered speculative worlding and emancipatory gaming, considering the possibilities and limits of tabletop roleplay for solidarity and societal change. David and his fellow panelists Laurie O'Connel, Samuel Clarice Mui Shen Ern, and Eryk Sawicki looked at the history of gaming and resistance, covering, amongst others, the work of Avery Alder, Jay Dragon, Soul Muppet and Zedeck Siew. 

Samuel Clarice Mui Shen Ern is a play designer and tech artist from Malaysia who create multimodal games and interactive installations about everyday moments and extraordinary worlds. Their work Horse Girl is a body horror, solo tabletop RPG journaling game, based on The Wretched by Chris Bissette, where you tell the story of a woman who consents to be mentally and surgically transformed into a horse.

Eryk Sawicki "I’m a pierogi-core Polish grafik dezajner creativ producer obsessed with paper and the old-school internet. Here’s what I’m up to: If you know what OSR TTRPGs are, you’re my kinda person. If you need advice about graphic design, printing, shipping or retail, get in touch. I run Peregrine Coast Press, a boutique tabletop RPG retailer, distributor, and fulfilment house. We make sad gay games. It’s our thing. I’m the operations manager at SoulMuppet."

Laurie O'Connel is a writer, journalist and political organiser. His RPG writing can be found at twelvepinspress.com. His political and cultural writing can be found at marxist.com and communist.red

Uneven Futures: Art, Roleplaying Games, and the Allure of the Otherwise

Uneven Futures: Art, Roleplaying Games, and the Allure of the Otherwise
Queens Park Book Festival, Queen’s Park, North London; August 31st 2025

Local visual artists and game designers Nick Murray and David Blandy discuss how we can imagine hopeful futures through storytelling and game play. In conversation with writer and curator Jamie Sutcliffe.

In association with Brent Biennial