EVENT: SIDE QUEST FOR THE REAL (DECEMBER 2—21 2025, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND)

Side Quest for the Real: live action, art, and social fictions in Geneva

December 3–21, 2025

Curated by Christian Bili and Samuel Wagen-Magnon

Le Commun, Geneva, Switzerland

For the Win (FTW) presents the second edition of Art, jeu & société, an ambitious initiative dedicated to artistic practices engaging with gaming as both form and method. Subtitled Side Quest for the Real, this year’s edition unfolds from 3 to 21 December 2025 at Le Commun in Geneva. The programme combines exhibitions, playable workshops, and theoretical encounters where art, live action role-playing (LARP), and critical inquiry intersect.

The Art, jeu & société initiative was first launched in 2023 to trace how artists use the logic of games to address pressing political, social, and ecological tensions. The inaugural edition, titled The Seashore of Endless Worlds, established the project as a key platform in the European debate on game-based art, gamification, and performative play.

The 2025 edition, Side Quest for the Real, takes LARP as its conceptual and performative framework. Rather than focusing on digital worlds, it turns to participatory fictions enacted in physical space, embodied simulations that blur the lines between theatre, pedagogy, and activism. LARP, often described as a “theatre without spectators,” is reimagined here as a mode of social experimentation: a means of testing alternative realities, collective ethics, and the fragile contracts that govern the everyday.

The exhibition brings together an international roster including alfatih, Sara Bissen, Ryan Decker, Carina Erdmann & Steph Holl-Trieu & Lore D Selys, Loretta Fahrenholz, Gabriele Garavaglia, Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė, Hypernormalisa (Lisa Mayer) & Emil Adam, Lauren Huret & Maria Guță, Jean-Baptiste Janisset, Tom K Kemp, Andrea Khôra, Juliette Lizotte, lo.me, Sveta Mordovskaya, Bahar Noorizadeh, Susan Ploetz, Alex Quicho & Raw2.2, Random Kingdom, Anja Ripoll & Tristan Cubero, Jak Ritger, Jana Romanova, Jennifer Merlyn Scherler, Noura Tafeche & Tobia P. Bettoni.

A key strand of the programme is the series of LARP ateliers jouables, inviting visitors to experience first-hand the performative systems conceived by artists:

• La table des possibles — Carina Erdmann, Steph Holl-Trieu & Lore D Selys (3 Dec)
• Le Cinquième Feu — Tom K Kemp (6 Dec)
• Better Troll — Jana Romanova (13 Dec)
• Entrainment Protocol 00100 — Andrea Khôra (14 Dec)
• The Quale (Larp & Media Experiment) — Susan Ploetz (20 Dec)

Across these sessions, play operates as a diagnostic and speculative tool, testing how fiction circulates through bodies and how shared imagination can reconfigure the real.

With Side Quest for the Real, Art, jeu & société reaffirms FTW’s commitment to play as a mode of research and social articulation, an ongoing exploration of how artistic forms can both mirror and rewrite the conditions of contemporary life.

Founded in 2020 by artist Christian Bili and art historian Samuel Wagen-Magnon, FTW is an association devoted to artistic study and exhibition practices. Bridging art and research to develop their practical and social value, FTW seeks to produce situated and useful forms of knowledge for both artists and the wider public. It conceives criticism as a process for unfolding potential, and history as a prospective tool for grasping emergent phenomena. Its research areas include the construction and politicisation of social models through games, an archaeology of the relations between economy and ecology, and a contribution to the anthropology of technology through the elaboration of the concept of the artificial.