Das Kollektiv Artists of INTERSPACE COLLECTIVE, a Berlin based BIPOC art collective, will show some of their latest works and invite other collectives to take over the gallery space and transform it according to their understanding of play and games.

We are holding each other’s hand, laughing and spinning ever so faster. We are chanting songs while doing so. Next thing you know we are laying in trenches, for cover, while the enemy is pointing their weapons at us. When you close your eyes, you can see visions of the jungle. Your friend the tiger has come to gift you a fruit. Colourful lights flicker onto your face, your hand is on the lever, pulling it, hoping for similar symbols.

Play and games have been around for as long as memory has existed. Approaching games and play from a historical point of view, some researches have argued that games and culture are deeply intertwined with one another. Our earlier ancestors and animals are considered to have a playful nature too. - Homo ludens an explanatory model according to which humans learn their abilities to deal with their environment through play.

There is considerable talk about the freedom behind play. It is supposed to emerge from a voluntary place, attached to lust and pleasure. However, games also have rules and constraints. Some of these constraints are connected to the natural circumstances, e.g. gravity, while others are more arbitrary like coloured codes.

In this way, play becomes a place of ambivalence in which we experience ourselves as self-determined and externally determined at the same time. In the movement of play, moving and being moved interpenetrate. We experience ourselves in bringing forth and letting happen. In binding and being bound. In our power and powerlessness, play strengthens and transcends the sovereignty of the self. Approaching our environment through a dialogue with it.

Play is free. Play is outside of ordinary life. Play has distinct times and spaces. Play creates order. Play has no material interest (comp. Huizinga: Homo Ludens). Now take the word play and exchange it with the term art.

We live in a post-colonial and patriarchal world, where the dialogue with our surroundings has given way to massive attempts to impose will and exploitation with patriarchal and white supremacist authority. This has led to numerous ills, such as climate catastrophes, wars, famine and oppression, and has even progressed to the point where we see our very existence as humanity threatened. It seems that the way we treat each other and our environment has to change radically for us to have a chance. Either we put an end to the current social structure as it is, or it puts an end to all of us.

In order to counteract this, we believe that we cannot act with the same means as before. Our society can’t continue to try to unilaterally impose the will of a few on the world to continue to profit from it ruthlessly. We believe that it is the task of art, as in play, to find unconventional ideas and alternatives for a seemingly unsolvable deadlocked problem through creative dialogue with the world and the people that surround us. We believe that for this dialogue, the one-sided viewpoint of a patriarchy with a God complex must be overcome and especially those who have been marginalized, persecuted and condemned to silence for so long should be given a voice.

We argue for a large overlap between play and art. In this, we are opening a space of true ambiguity between these two notion