Het Parlement van de Dingen

client: Ambassade van de Noordzee
serious game / installation
2020, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
in collaboration with Maarten Meijer & Dennis Hamer

In our age of planetary change, relations between human and nonhuman inhabitants of the Earth constitute a new form of geopolitics. To house this geopolitics, the French philosopher Bruno Latour has proposed a new parliament to help us engage with the politics of nature. With our project “Give a Voice to the North Sea” we developed a game using this concept in a very precarious area of the Netherlands. We used the Oosterschelde as a case study for diplomatic encounters between plants, humans, and nonhuman animals.

The new parliament Latour suggests is called “The Parliament of Things”. By taking everything to be a “thing” (or an “actant”) we place humans on equal footing with their environment. Without this hierarchy we create a novel politico-environmental sensibility which sheds new light on our democratic system. Rather than enforcing human perspectives upon our environment The Parliament of Things invites non-humans to the table and gives them an equal voice.

One approaches the parliament by a small wooden path. This is where the participants meet their actor before entering the parliament setting. When entering the circle, actors can lift their flag exposing their role and position in the parliament.

The wooden pavilion compliments the landscape of the Oosterschelde and is positioned on the fluctuating line of land and water. This allows players to familiarize themselves with the different facets of the landscape and fantasize about the future of that same landscape.

11 December 2020, several locations along the Oosterschelde