Nomad Settlers

Introductory video for an online participative fiction / HD / 09’56” / 2021

This is a collective fiction of a slum in a near future. It explores the possibilities of archival practices and narrative media research to investigate the projective aspect of agency in precarious urban communities. The slum contrasts the idea of the “nomad” with the idea of forced displacement. In this way, the role of the imagination of solidarity collectives in the construction of a shared future is highlighted.

“Nomad Settlers” is an introductory video for the online story-development of the fictive slum “Villa Futuro.” After watching the video, you are invited to visit the URL: https://villafuturo.com/index.php/the-settlers/

Here you can participate in the creation of a fictive temporary settlement by putting yourself in a situation of forced displacement. On the website, you are asked to think about solutions to the basic needs of settling down and to fill in your answers in questionnaires. As part of the artistic research, your answers will be collected and compared with other answers to find similarities that may result in the most likely scenario of the settlement. To illustrate this possible scenario, digital images and videos are continuously created and published on villafuturo.com. Based on these results, new questionnaires and new digital material are created to expand the story. This process is repeated manually at regular intervals without using an AI script.

“Nomad Settlers” is based on the artistic research project “Villa Futuro” by Gonzalo H. Rodríguez at the scientific/artistic Ph.D. program of the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg.