Brent Biennial 2025: AIR Ritual – Our Place, No Place

About the event

In this session, we will play Our Place, No Place, a game made in collaboration with Jo Lindsey Walton, we imagine the complexities of a better future together. Our Place, No Place is a tabletop role-playing game where we create a shared world, drawing a map and defining its landscapes, then step into the lives of characters who inhabit it. As we navigate a year in this imagined space, unexpected local events shape our stories and a community emerges through play. Our space, 200 years in the future, is no longer an abstract concept, but an imaginatively lived reality. The work insists that we will survive these traumas, but asks what will life then be like, in this different, sustainable, more collaborative world? No prior experience of gaming is necessary to play.

This event will take place in the Garden Room, Harrow Campus, Westminster University (Northwick Park Roundabout Harrow HA1 3TP)

About the artist

David Blandy (he/him) is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas as diverse as ecology, history, science and arenas of play. He makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again.

Blandy searches for meaning in cultural life, through an expanded form of auto-anthropology, sifting through multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives, weaving poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. Perhaps it’s hubris, but he wants to build complex stories that sketch out a future of interdependence, through visual poetry and immersive play.

Blandy is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London. His films are distributed by LUX, London.


Brent Biennial 2025: AIR Ritual

Each breath is a new possibility of life. Inhalation and exhalation as cycles of existence. Air is also the catalytic substance of ignition; it represents the power of utterance; declaration, song, whistles, chants, spells, of mobilising ideas and knowledge, people and animals. The intangible, invisible force that creates changes in culture, education, legal systems, religion and ideologies.

AIR Ritual forms part of the programme for Brent Biennial 2025. Titled “Bones, stones, and calling the four elements”, it seeks to invoke a communal spirit of gathering and imagining. Between June to October 2025 four ‘rituals’, WATER (22 June), EARTH (24 July - 1 August) FIRE (26 September - 12 October) and AIR (17 -24 October) will unfold at four Brent sites – a public reservoir, a park, an old medical facility and a university campus. Located in the north and south of the borough — Harrow, Wembley and Kilburn — the ‘rituals’ will feature artists presenting workshops, talks, performance and exhibition.