Mario Udzenija: The Medea Project

In this role play summit, all participants will be invited to play a LARP with a working title The Medea Project.

The plot for the LARP has a starting point in the adaptation of a greek tragedy Medea that marxist poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini made in 1969. The players for our LARP will be separated in two basic groups with different systems of thought who are now encountering each other for the first time. The story revolves around a plastic waste island a size of Belgium, recently discovered floating around the South Pole. A special team certified as the Argonauts was sent by the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning, set up by Musk foundation and other corporate sponsors to investigate the rumors that this Island of plastic waste is actually inhabited. According to the very few and obscure reports a huge number of nuclear refugees has formed a self organized communites all around this island where they have developed a common ownership of all of the means of production based in the digestion of an unknown mutated bacteria. It is highly possible that this extraordianry bacterial colonies have developed a sustainable life cycles by digestion of both plastic and nuclear waste.

The aim of the first group will be to locate a Medea, a code name for any character which would be able to pass this knowledge to the Musk foundation and other generous corporate sponsors. The aim of the second group is to find ways how to spread the revolution to the decadent capitalist western world using the bodies of Argonauts. In the second round I would open up a disscusion with a short introduction to the topics of this LARP. Estimated duration is 30 minutes. I will point out the examples of strategies of reappropriation in video games, my own experience both in commercial and artistic projects, to point out some failures and emerging new possibilities of understanding the intersection of social and gaming elements, with the special interest in the ideas of disaster communism and the reappropriation of corporate tools.

Bio 


Born in 1987, Croatia, Mario Udzenija is currently working on projects which are based in expanded experience of video games and its critical examination.
 He has earned his Master degree at Graphic University in 2013 in Zagreb, Academy of Fine Arts, 2015, also in Zagreb, and finally at Universitat der Kunste in Berlin, media class of Hito Steyerl in 2017. Mario received an award of FOHS Foundation in 2012, Essl art award nominations in 2015 and Dean award University of Zagreb in 2015. He has exhibited his work in group exhibitions since 2010 in Zagreb, Split, Strassbourg, Cologne and Berlin and has done some web-based projects including Kordikeps (2009), CRC (2011) and Goodmuorning (2005).