Paper short abstract:

I report on three arts-research projects that used more-than-human role-play to explore the governance of urban green spaces. Participants leant into the impossibility of speaking as more-than-humans, to create ironic play that opened up new avenues for shared reflection and critique.

Paper long abstract:

I report on three interlinked arts and research projects (2019-2023) that used Live Action Role Play (LARP) to enable participants to explore futures from more-than-human standpoints. The Algorithmic Food Justice project invited community growers and tech researchers to speak as/for their ‘companion species’ in a scenario about food security in London, UK. The Treaty of Finsbury Park invited arts audiences to role-play as park creatures, negotiating a treaty for shared governance of this urban park, using a fictional ‘rights of nature’ law. Finally, stakeholders of the River Lea in London were invited to consult on a proposed techno-fix for river pollution as more-than-human characters.

In each case, the groups experimented with more-than-human experiences and ethical positionings. An important quality of the LARPs was their liveliness, creating a shared emotional experience connected to the improvisational qualities of the gameplay. These enabled the shared recognition of irony in playing anthropomorphic relations that were clearly impossible (minting a legal treaty between stag beetles and Haringey Council) yet were clearly reasonable (since stag beetles are globally in decline). Here, irony was used as a device to hold ‘contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes’ and ‘the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true’ (Haraway, 1991). I argue that in pursuing novel workshops of this kind, what matters is trying and failing at more-than-human futures, where playing into the basic impossibilities of becoming more-than-human provides an opening into shared ecological imaginaries.