Simona&Ramona are back! As part of an artist residency organized by Unicorn - Artists in Solidarity, they invite you to try out the mechanics of a future board game:
Left Terra: A Queer Adventure
Cooperative board game not suitable for fascists
You are navigating through a world of struggles and, with the help of cats, queer wizzards and withches, activists, feminists and anarchists, you are on a mission to defeat smaller and bigger nazis and to keep Left Terra safe from their awful menace.
In eight rounds you get to complete quests, solve little games of camaraderie, gather ressources or lose them at the mercy of the cards (a little bit like in life), and decide whether to cooperate or not in order to defeat several regular nazis until everyone, in a joint effort, needs to save Left Terra from one of the Uber Nazis or die trying!
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"Left Terra is a game of strategy, cooperation, dice throwing, quest solving and card playing. We are making it because we love board games but we were often frustrated by their insensitivity to social issues, by the fact that they use a lot of discriminatory slang towards various persons and because they are completely cis male dominated, from their imagery to their narratives.
We need at this point and with your help to test the mechanics, playability and ethics of this future game. Therefore we invite you to a Queer Board Games afternoon and thank you in advance for your help. Also, please don’t be disappointed by the fact that you will just play with some blank cards only including the main actions. The game does not have yet its visuals and only a handful of characters and narrations – but we will present a few prototypes of how the visual and the stories will look like and be like.
We hope to finish the game by the beginning of 2018 and make it available online."
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UNICORN - Artists in Solidarity is a network of artists and cultural workers committed to solidarity in the artist community. By building collegial alliances and initiating conversations on how working conditions and free expression for artists are impacted by political change, they work to counteract reactionary and right-wing politics. They work to support each other in a precarious situation, by studying together, sharing meals and resources, speaking out collectively, organizing locally and sharing knowledge globally. UNICORN also run a residency program for artists at risk by mobilizing resources from local institutions and artist run spaces.
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As Simona and Ramona (or as the drag personas Claude and Dersch) the duo started to work and evolved from their life, partnership and from their joint experiences as queer/LGBTQAI activists, and as queer identities living in the Romanian oppressive, homophobe, heteronormative context. They are cis, white, abled persons. They use their own bodies and experiences, such as they are, trying to not instrumentalize experiences that are not their.
They are interested in queer and gender issues, Simona working on related topics from within the contemporary art field and Ramona mixing literary studies with her experience of working/volunteering in feminist groups and anti-discrimination associations.
They are also currently researching on connected issues, such as queer identities in Romanian media and cultural contexts (Ramona) and local lesbian lost herstories from before 1989 (Simona).
They sometimes collaborate in their work with Ileana, a voice performer and storyteller, under the drag and stage names Claude, Dersch and the Sky Collector. They are also part of Local Goddesses, a group of women interested in feminist art practices, based in Bucharest.
More about them here:
www.simonaramona.wordpress.com, www.poetrybody.wordpress.com