Gathering Storm

Join our UK associate David Blandy to explore the impacts of colonial food production through a new collaborative world-building game.

About

As part of this season’s Politics of Food programme, Delfina Foundation UK associate artist David Blandy has been exploring his familial link to colonial food production and the legacy of agriculture as a tool to consolidate authority. David’s paternal grandfather was involved in the Swynnerton Plan, a British colonial scheme initiated in the 1950s with the aim of creating an African middle class in Kenya: a form of social engineering through agriculture.

Emerging out of his work in recent years around group world building, at Delfina Foundation David has been developing a tabletop game as a means to embark on a collaborative exploration of his research around the legacies of the Swynnerton Plan.

For this workshop, we invite you to watch or play an early version of Gathering Storm, the collaborative world-building game created by David. Players will take it in turns to add elements to a map, imagining a post-colonial sci-fi world and then creating a set of characters to inhabit this space. They will then respond to prompts, coming to terms with hidden histories and present injustices. No previous experience of tabletop gaming is necessary to play.

The evening will commence with an introduction to the game by artist David Blandy. Guests will then break into groups to play, supported by specially invited guests Susuana Amoah, Annie Jael Kwan and Jamie Sutcliffe.

Complementary alcoholic and non-alcoholic pineapple-based drinks will be provided to the audience.

Please book via Eventbrite. If you have any questions, please contact us on events@delfinafoundation.com.

This game is a starting point for a wider project David is developing, incorporating text, installation, games and moving image.

The monsters’ time is over. But some still remain along with the alien fruit that fills pockets and their bellies. We strive for another world. Perhaps the world from before. But the world from before is gone. So we must grow something new.

Biographies

Susuana Amoah is the University of Sussex Stuart Hall Foundation Fellow (2021/2022). She is a Brighton-based cultural activist, artist-curator, and PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her practice encompasses socially-engaged art, fugitive feminism, decolonial praxis and exploring creative ways of highlighting narratives and social movements by marginalised groups.

Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator and researcher based in London and working between the UK, Europe and Asia. Her exhibition-making, programming, publication, and teaching practice is located at the intersection of contemporary art, cultural and pedagogicalactivism with an interest in archives, feminist, queer and alternative histories and knowledges, collective practice and solidarity. She co-leads Asia-Art-Activism, the interdisciplinary research network, and is the founding council member of Asia Forum that unfolded across digital gatherings in 2021 and an inaugural programme in Venice at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in 2022.

Jamie Sutcliffe is a writer, curator, and co-director of Strange Attractor Press. His work explores artistic encounters with science fictive fabulation, the politics of gaming, animation and its multiple entanglements with developments in the life sciences, haunted media, the digital uncanny, and the persistence of myth, all understood as technologies of selfhood. He is the editor of Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic, published by The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, and his essays, reviews, and interviews have been featured in Art Monthly, Frieze, The White Review, Rhizome, Art Review, The Quietus, Art Agenda, Bricks From The Kiln, and IsThisIt, amongst other

POLITICS OF FOOD

This event is part of the public programme of Delfina Foundation’s fifth season of the Politics of Food, in partnership with Gaia Art Foundation and with additional support from a range of individuals and partners.