Mangrove forests are located on the coastal borders of the colonized world, between water and land, where the oceans and their waste seep in, surrounded by the rhythmic movement of the tidal currents, constantly changing shape. Gayatri Kodikal finds them a special area “where multiple histories and languages ​​explode in rhizome-like tentacles and mingle with no hierarchy whatsoever.” She designed the plan to develop a mangrove game world, as a metaphor and place of resistance, recovery and reconciliation. This thematically fits into her practice in which she works with films, designs sound, performance and games. She approaches them interactively, as an installation and as 'game-world readings': a form of performance devised by herself with old stories and game elements with a techno-spiritual twist. She writes stories to unmask colonial thinking and the linear narratives that go with it – a linearity that does not exist in the rhizomatic mangroves. Nor did it exist in the immersive game installation she made in 2021 in TENT: a place for non-linear time travel, from today's Lisbon to 17th-century Persian Ormuz to post-Soviet Georgia and beyond. In this latest plan, she wanted to re-weave narratives around the intersecting paths of animals and objects.

Kodikal studied in India and then in the Netherlands at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem. She explores feminist and postcolonial histories through image, sound, play and performances. She has operated in India at the intersection of theatre, performance and visual arts in various festivals and more recently at TENT in Rotterdam and at the Holland Festival. The art world should do more with gaming, the R&D committee thought when it read this proposal. A large and well-thought-out project that makes you curious about the results.

That's how Kodikal started her research. To imagine the 'mangrove game-world' as a place of political resistance, recovery and reconciliation, she delved into stories about these shape-shifting and impenetrable forests. She started working with research material from previous projects and collected additional data and literature. She also entered into discussions with experts in the fields of critical theory, environment and art. From all this she began to write, weaving a narrative between fiction and non-fiction. She wanted to use this for lecture performances and a paper publication. “This would be my first publication introducing ideas from the mangrove game world and game world lectures.”