Game Night: Unsettling Settlers of Catan

In partnership with DMG (Dames Making Games), we invite you to attend Game Night: Unsettling Settlers of Catan, which concludes Golboo Amani’s research residency with SAVAC. In May 2016, Amani undertook a project with SAVAC under the title The Lie of the Land. Using an urban garden as a site-specific research space, Amani hosted several skill-sharing workshops and talks which focused on knowledge exchanges about nature’s various cycles and offered participants a space to investigate settlers’ relationships to Turtle Island. Informed by the knowledge produced by the exchanges at the Garden Skool, Amani produced an Unsettling Settlers of Catan expansion set. The evening will start with a talk by Amani. Afterwards, attendees will play Unsettling Settlers: Intervention in groups and then participate in a Q&A and provide feedback for the creator.

‘Settlers of Catan’ is a popular board game that encourages players to employ colonial settlement strategies on an unpopulated wild landscape. Relying on the colonial settler narrative, ‘Settlers of Catan’ does not include in its infrastructure representations of the many nations of indigenous people that preexist colonial settlement, narratives of the global migrant and conditions of conflict that arise with colonial expansion. Instead ‘Settlers of Catan’ and it various permutations and expansions rely on the common fallacies of colonial development. Unsettling Setters: Intervention aims to interrupt the game space in order to employ strategies that strengthen our ability to imagine and practice critical alternatives and counter hegemonic action. Included in the game are new game pieces, cards and rules to be played out on the Settlers of Catan board game.