Three questions for Eloïse Bonneviot & Anne de Boer

The artist duo Eloïse Bonneviot & Anne de Boer explores interspecies relationships, climate anxieties, and speculative futures. Using playful methods, they create works that open new perspectives on ecological crises. At Stuttgart’s Lapidarium, they invite visitors to play Council of Neobiota – Air Extension. This portable board game puts players in the role of invasive species working together to develop strategies against environmental destruction. The Stuttgart-specific Air Extension adds new game mechanics focused on air quality and pollution—experienced right in the historic sculpture garden. 

CURRENT: Your board game Council of Neobiota invites players to embody invasive species and collectively resist capitalist ecological pressures. In role-playing practices, roleplay methods refer to the different strategies players use to embody or perform a character or role — whether it’s fully scripted, loosely improvised, or co-created with others.
 There’s a specific concept called deep role play or character immersion, where the player goes beyond just making game moves: they start to emotionally, mentally, or even physically experience the world from the character’s perspective (flow state). 

Have you actively worked with specific roleplay methods or aimed to create deep roleplay states where players truly immerse themselves in these non-human perspectives? 

Eloïse Bonneviot & Anne de Boer: We expressively design games where the audience is paradoxically not asked to fully physically become the non-human character. To us, this means a more inclusive work, where being shy isn’t a handicap—to avoid the pitfall of an audience feeling trapped by the work. The ease with which a public member will start to play our games, to forget they are in an exhibition or art event, is exactly the right state of mind where one can experience the world from the critter’s perspective. 

To have a relaxed audience that fully commits to the world they play in, without worrying whether they are playing in the ‘correct manner’, is the first step to forgetting yourself in the game and its world. When one starts to experience a garden as a stone, for example, then at some point, they really become guided by that way of being in the world — where things are slow, where changes don’t matter in the same way as for the audience member playing as a one-day fly, for example. 

In the midst of these interactions—in the upset at others’ decisions, or the joy in finding kin—lies the emotional bond that allows for a deeper embodiment and emotional identification with the other-than-human character. 

It’s useful here to consider how games sit within the realm of performance. There is an element that is live, and the audience is asked to interact with the situation provided by the game; but the public is totally merged with the world of the game while remaining entirely themselves. 

CURRENT: What kinds of experiences or reflections do you intend to create by using roleplay methods? 

Eloïse Bonneviot & Anne de Boer: Another interesting aspect is a direct consequence of the previous point about the emotional state of the player; games can be used as a powerful speculative tool, a kind of real-time sketch for situations that one would be unlikely to find themselves in normally. Sometimes it is hard to look at the place we live in with a fresh eye. We are so much with and in the city that projecting beyond the trouble and toward possibilities becomes hard. What we hope to do with our game is, on the one hand, to help people feel more powerful, while enabling them to imagine and shape their environment in a way they wouldn’t normally think about. 

For this specific game, Council of Neobiota, we pulled real-life information about landscape and biodiversity, while basing most of our cards on IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) recommendations for making our city more resilient to climate change. It’s really inspiring to look at all these solutions, but the format of the report itself makes it hard for the general public to grasp. In a way, the game was designed to focus on and allow players to experience all this data and information circulating around climate change, climate action, and ecology. In the game, you can roll out all these initiatives, fight pollution and destruction across a city — all the while using the superpower of your invasive species character to create utopia projects. We hope that it will allow people to come up with exploratory ways to reshape their experience of the city of Stuttgart. 

CURRENT: For the Air Extension in Stuttgart, you aim to develop a game dynamic that incorporates air quality and pollution. What interests you most about translating such an intangible, invisible force into a playable, tactile format? 

Eloïse Bonneviot & Anne de Boer: Of course, the immateriality of air is very appealing for visual artists. The very fact that it is invisible presents an interesting challenge. More broadly, air is also an insidious element in the ecological cycle of the city precisely because of this apparent immateriality. So there was this double challenge: making it visible both in the game and in the gameplay. 

For the festival, we spoke with several experts about the specific conditions in Stuttgart — the river being off-center while concentrating industry, the direction of the wind serving as a marker of social inequality, to name a few. It became apparent that air is directly connected to other issues the city is facing in terms of pollution and climate change. So it was interesting for us to also take into consideration how air is connected to everything. 

In art, it’s often useful to look at how something operates as a way to overcome a visual difficulty. That’s what we’ve been trying to do with our Air Extension. How can it overlay the existing gameplay? How can it remain immaterial while still being visible? In other words, how can we work with its attributes rather than against them? 

We decided to look at the compass rose — a tool traditionally used in cartography for orientation. In French, it translates to rose des vents, or “wind rose,” a very fitting name. We used it to imagine a marker indicating wind direction, strength, and the resources — positive or negative — being scattered across the map. For example, strong wind might push water or seeds into new parts of the map, but it could also spread pollution and destroy infrastructure — or both. Here, you create something adaptive that has a deep impact on the play experience, while remaining largely immaterial. 

Credits: Eloïse Bonneviot & Anne de Boer, All of the critters, 2024 © Silviu Guiman