Forest as a Long Term



for Neringa Forest Architectures
3 game-simulations
15-50 players start:
oct 2023
end:
sep 2024


game 1

Forest Conspiracy Backcasting is a live-action narrative game set in an abstracted forest that has absorbed centuries of ecological damage, mythic memory, and deferred justice. The players are exiled from all futures they once imagined. The forest, like the underworld, is a temporal trap: it grows sideways through time, its logic recursive rather than linear. But something is changing. The dead are beginning to conspire—not to escape, but to intervene. Across the mossy layers of interrupted futures, they begin to craft new rules of habitation, stewardship, and refusal.





play-board.

how to play it? 


The game is played across a temporal board that diagrammatically stages the past, present, and future. Each round involves three kinds of players: one who brackets the past (rewriting it from the standpoint of a possible future), one who mediates the sequence (adjusting for coherence and causal tension), and one who fast-forwards (projecting consequences based on ideal or tragic conditions). Drawing from four card types—event, space, role, and rule—players compose constellations of thick situations, which are then assessed not for truth, but for their transformative plausibility. This is a game of counter-temporality, where action begins from the endpoint and rewinds with conviction.


At the core of Forest Conspiracy Backcasting is the idea that even in the zones of historical exhaustion, political agency can be redistributed in non-linear ecology. Instead of playing to win, players intervene to alter the terms of continuity: which rules endure, which roles dissolve, and what infrastructures of care or coercion are retrofitted. Inspired by Lorraine Daston’s concept of “thick rules,” the game insists on discretion, local specificity, and contextual judgment. The cards do not dictate—they propose, complicate, invite response and gestural presence. The game unfolds as a process of situated interpretation: a rehearsal for speculative governance among the dead.

The forest remembers your death and birth. You carry no rights, but time: spoiled time, extinct time, borrowed time. But with others, you begin to imagine how even the most uninhabitable conditions could be otherwise. You gather moss together— full of roles, events and rules. You plot and plan. But it is guaranteed to break. The game is the story of what changes, what resists, and how rules, once enacted, begin to root themselves—deep in the soil of impossible futures. The forest does not forget. But it might forgive, under conditions you help to define.



game 2The project concluded in Morocco with LARP performance in the agricultural oasis Moving with the Dunes for which the group prepared scenography and various scenarios of future forestry. 


The Live action Role Play Game considered landscapes beyond their abstract and economic value, introducing scenarios where participants a.re encouraged to navigate landscapes as evolving organisms. Oscillating between collective moments of movement and stillness, participants explored how their actions, as resource users or guardians, shape bioregional dynamics and alter future ecological conditions
Moving with the Dunes, invited participants on a sensory expedition beyond Essaouira, a coastal area with a rich history of trade, migration, and ecological change. Players explored historical links stretching from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and engaged in sonic and embodied activations, prompting them to reflect on their relationship to land, movement, and temporality. Dwelling in shaded areas, they absorbed the experience by sharing food and stories, and crafting hand-made offerings to the dunes—a practice designed to foster a renewed sense of ecological interdependence.