2024 · Made in partnership with the Borås Textile Museum and Skogen. Supported by the Lindholmen Experimental Media Grant and Kulturbryggan.
A four day live role-playing game for 25 players set the bogland of Västra Götaland, Sweden. Using modified statare cuisine and textiles, modified psychodrama, and wooden sculptures.
Like a interplanar entity slowly emerging from the dismal bogs of Västra Götaland, players were invited to dissolve their self-narratives and merge into two enigmatic streams of collective consciousness.
Experience One: Secluded within the dim light of 18th century agricultural worker’s dwelling, dig into the claustrophobic embrace and domestic anxieties of an intimate cross-generational family preparing for the looming spectre of change. Tightly woven with an embodied study of period craft production, their existence punctuated by ritualistic, technological intrusions introduced by shadows from another plane.
Experience Two: Awaken in the boglands, submerged in a narrative that demands physicality and ritualistic repetition. Here, via improvisational movement, you’re invited to activate a thousand layered years of decaying moss in preparation for a transition to a early 1900’s sawmill. Amidst its ghostly but functional machinery, participants engage in creating large sculptural entities, weaving their new corporeal forms.
Procrustean Bed was a primarily non-verbal experience that focuses on material and somatic interactions to co-create a sphinx-like allegory that takes inspiration from intertwined regional narratives: the class struggle of Statare agricultural laborers, the mechanization of textile production, historical artefacts and biomes, folk magic, and interplanar travel.
