Larpy: Starring Me, You and Chief Belief Officer
2017
HD video, 28:00 minutes, fanzine (2016)
Credits: Cressida Kocienski (camera), Håkon Viksmo Lie (sound)
HD video, 28:00 minutes, fanzine (2016)
Credits: Cressida Kocienski (camera), Håkon Viksmo Lie (sound)
This project stems from a two-year participatory research into the aesthetics and ethics of Nordic Live Action Role-Playing (LARP / LAIV in Norwegian). Nordic LARP is a carefully organized game in which people play out characters physically, in a fictional story, in a setting that makes them feel like they are “really there”. There is no audience in LARP. The film is an embodied critique of live action role-playing (larp) in Norway, not only as recreation (Nordic LARP subculture) but also as a methodology adopted by corporate workplaces, care-giving institutions and spiritual organisatioins. Located in three architectural spaces around the city of Trondheim, Norway, where larp takes place/is used – an old oil platform used for safety training, the Humanist Association and a “village” created only for Nordic LARP – the film narrates the complex relationship between the somatic and the emotional in relation to the idea of controlling contingency (training for future eventualities) in a neoliberal landscape.