On 3rd November, Zoë and Laragh travelled to Manchester to take part in a test run of the Bureaucratic Escape Room run by our colleagues in Manchester University. This is a participatory art installation which is part of the Austerity and Altered Life Courses Project, and a collaboration with artist Merel Smitt.
The Bureaucratic Escape Room is an immersive role-play installation that creates a fictional bureaucratic institution. Upon arrival, participants enter a fictional world of waiting rooms, appointments, forms, phone calls and administrative protocols. Audiences take on different roles within the institution, experiencing bureaucracy from different perspectives within the same system.
Developed through artistic research conducted in Rotterdam and Manchester, the project draws on conversations with residents, people navigating bureaucratic systems, frontline workers, policymakers and academics. Rather than observing bureaucratic systems from the outside, participants experience them from within.
What starts as a familiar office environment slowly unfolds into a surreal experience. As the installation unfolds, the boundary between reality and fiction starts to blur, inviting participants to question the systems they navigate (and maintain) in their daily lives and imagine how they might be different.
The Bureaucratic Escape Room will be running at the University of Manchester over several dates in November.