Engaging the complex past of Minnette De Silva’s buildings through narrative games: Some preliminary reflections
Dulmini Perera, Bauhaus University Weimar, March 2023
There is an increasing interest within architectural education to engage the inherent intersectional, entangled narratives surrounding the history of buildings and architectural practices in ways that are helpful to think through the complex relationship between modernity, colonialism, and questions of difference. Peripheral sites of the modern colonial project particularly where female practitioners and their building practices co-evolved has much to offer this discussion. The life, work, and the archive of South Asian architect Minnette De Silva is one such example.
Minnette De Silva studied architecture briefly in Bombay, worked for German émigré architect Otto Koenigsberger who was working in India, and studied at the AA between 1945 and 1948. Subsequently, she established her own regional practice in Kandy (in then Ceylon) and became the first Asian woman to be an associate of the RIBA in 1948. The year of 1947––the starting point of her practice––was a time of transition, not only for her own career, but for Sri Lanka itself, which would gain independence the following year. De Silva’s struggle to develop a modern regional architecture emerged on the one hand from within the colonial periphery and indicate multiple forms of resistance to the colonial project. Yet, in other ways, her ability to question Sri Lanka’s problematic relationships to coloniality was influenced by forms of knowing and doing she had acquired from the modern West through the social networks and cultural institutions she inhabited. As such, these struggles are significant not only because of the intentions and directionalities architects presumed to work towards but also in how these agendas were mediated within their practice sites, such as building, teaching, and writing.
Practice sites such as those of De Silva’s are sites of knowledge transfer that produce a richer conception of “narratives”, “difference” and “tensions” in relation to modernity and colonialism, which are other to the ways these concepts are usually theorised in the context of binary categories such as nature and culture, modernity and tradition, developed and underdeveloped, male and female. De Silva’s work leaves behind numerous sites of tension, ranging from her scrapbook-style autobiography, to the traces of her undemolished projects in Kandy and Colombo, and the remnants of material from her practice that are yet to find an institutional archive.[i] In other words, the tensions mentioned above relate to how her project is part of a complex past (historicity) and measures taken to understand and engage De Silva’s work in history (historiography). On the question of historiography, architectural historian Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi points towards how De Silva’s work is an invitation for historians, critics and others to look beyond what is generally considered the official archive of an architect (such as famous buildings or publications) and to explore aspects of their practice that do not appear straightforwardly in discursive networks.[ii] This condition outlined by Siddiqi prompts a reverse kind of questioning. If the complex past of a practice such as De Silva’s could not be understood through scholarly archives and standard forms of historiography, then what kind of historical sensibility is necessary to engage and explore her work in the context of the concerns of the present? How could such a sensibility be cultivated via education?
The questions around rethinking historical sensibility and the role of education points towards distinguishing between two modes of inquiry present in contemporary discussions. The first mode of inquiry looks into the much needed reforms within disciplinary understandings of a history of architecture and related methods.[iii] The second mode of inquiry regards critical historical thinking as a broader sensibility beyond disciplinary understandings of history. Framed in this manner, cultivating such a sensibility becomes less about finding better ways to present a more complex, intersectional or decolonial history of architecture but rather about cultivating better ways of critically engaging the issues related to intersectionality or coloniality of architecture in history. The argument in this project is directed towards the development of the latter. It is also argued here that to cultivate critical historical thinking as a basic sensibility requires a shift from looking at how ideas about the past can be taught to how ideas are learned. It is proposed that playful forms of interaction such as games can be helpful in such an endeavor.
Here I present some brief notes and observations around the experimental process of developing interactive narrative games. These games were developed collectively with BSc and MSc students at the Bauhaus University Weimar during the Winter semester of 2022 and addressed the work of Minnette De Silva through playful storytelling and conversation.[iv] In the first section I will briefly present the distinction between presenting more complex histories of architecture vs engaging the complexity of architecture in history as well as explore how this distinction relates to concepts of past, historicity, historiography, and narrative. I will also briefly point out how this distinction connects to questions of learning and what I mean by notions of playful interaction. In the second section I will briefly point out why De Silva’s project is a suitable site to explore some of these questions. In the third section, I would provide a brief introduction to the design of the four interactive games, namely Craftibly Minnette, Unraveling Hidden Narratives, Weaving the Bigger Picture and Abandon-me-not. The games are available for exploration and interaction in other parts of this website.
Analog Games from Left to right: Unravelling Narratives, Weaving the Bigger Picture, Craftibly Minnette, Abandon-me-not. Source: author
Historical sensibility, narratives, and learning
Understanding architectural practices in history is always more complicated than what architectural history (in the form of lectures, texts, and essays) can recognise and communicate.
This discrepancy arises due to the difference between the “historicity of things”, i.e., the fundamental conditions of being and change manifesting through structures of temporality that can never be fully understood, and the limitations of “methods” that seek to better map out and engage this condition. The limitations of methods emerging from disciplinary understandings of history for engaging historicity, has been addressed by several thinkers. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Martin Heidegger, irrespective of the differences in their positions towards the questions of history, nevertheless converge in advocating the need to understand the broader function of historicity beyond the disciplinary uses of the term.[v] They point to the need to destabilise the arrested temporality of particular forms of historical narratives and render processes of historicisation as a contested domain of action. Regarding design and architectural history, Tony Fry argues: “Clearly, the corpus of design history scholarship and its textual output is trivial if measured against the overwhelmingly active and relational complexity of the design. There is simply no correlation between the totality of the transformative agency of the designed and the assembled discourse of design.”[vi]
Hayden White has pointed out how looking beyond a historian’s history can, in fact, reveal expansive ways of dealing with narratives.[vii] According to White, the overemphasis on a “real” that privileges disciplinary archives and archival methods, in essence, inhibits an exploration of the complex relationship between narratives and the “presence of the past” within everyday life.[viii] Historical representation is in essence always a fiction—a narrative. Historical narratives are based on linking events. As argued by Keith Jenkins, failure to acknowledge “history as fiction” undoes the epistemological claims upon which history writing operates.[ix] For example Ricoeur has discussed how impoverished ideas of “time”, “historical event” and “narrative” have driven professional forms of historicisation as an explanatory endeavour that has severed its ties with storytelling.[x] This is often the case because many see storytelling as a “non-rigorous” form of exploration. In fact, it is the opposite. Those who take narrative seriously take into serious consideration that the “fictive imaginary dimension of all accounts of events does not mean that the events did not actually happen […] but it does mean that any attempt to describe events rely on the imagination”.[xi] This leads to the understanding that the process of narrativising entails particular ontological and epistemological choices. These choices, in turn, have distinct ideological and political implications.[xii] By choosing to set up events in a particular relationship the narrator foregrounds, i.e., makes present, particular relations while backgrounding others.
Often these questions of what is made present and absent within historical narratives are related to questions of choice as well as power relationships.[xiii] The acts of erasure within the process of narrativising arise often out of ethical and political choices. These choices are informed and affected by power relationships from the extended cultural, environmental, and technological domains that remain as externalities and are often not fully evident within the narrative output. In academic discussions on histories of buildings and architectural practices, there’s been an increasing interest in making these power relationships more explicit. Yet there is much to be done, particularly in the context of education and pedagogy, to move beyond reformist frameworks, where trained professionals seek to present more complex historical narratives, which in turn, do not necessarily guarantee that all those who engage with these narratives develop a sensibility for the complexity of narrativising history.
The distinction between looking at narratives and the process of narrativising is addressed in this project as pointing towards the need to shift attention from teaching to learning. For Wineburg, Kappell and Elliott, this much needed ability to deal with narrativising processes is directly related to a broader way of thinking about information and learning in a social world, which is changing drastically with the presence of digital technologies. In other words, contemporary digital conditions further complicate the relations between facts and fictions, and fiction misconstrued as factual. Embedded in this argument is also a questioning of established ideas within education about historical sensibility as mainly having to do with memory, i.e., an ability to revisit facts anchored to a past when, in fact, memories are radically constructed. Memories always relate to becoming futural or choices about the future. In Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, Wineburg emphasises how history learnt informally through conversation influences and moderates the information learnt formally and contributes to collective memory.[xiv] By further problematising the questions of learning in the context of growing digital technologies, which provide easy access to an abundance of historical information, he suggests how cultivating a historical sensibility within education is not about strengthening a learner’s ability to make pronouncements that, like a “judges gavel shut the book of history.”[xv] Instead, a historical sensibility should promote those faced with multiple pieces of information, unfamiliar documents and scholarly texts to frame questions in such a way as to better understand the complex entanglements between these various elements. Learning history should encourage skepticism, discourage haste, and counter tendencies to confirm biases.[xvi] A historical sensibility is one that should enable a detachment from a forced sensibility that attempts to associate ideas only within established frameworks, or that scans materials only through established markers. These studies also emphasise the ways in which advanced professionals and graduate students are able to create such a detachment whereas the average student or young learner does not immediately show such a capability.[xvii] As such, shifting attention to the second-order task of the complexity of narrative construction rather than the presentation of complex narratives is an essential factor in realising the political potential of learning.
Designing and playing games based on history, provides a radically different framework for processes of narrativisation. Setting up a game with mechanics of interaction with the past and imagining ways of portraying this world, or simply playing with a game that relates the questions of narrative to questions of history, can enable learners to become aware of the complex relationships between narratives, history, events, causality and time in more immersive ways. Games liberate narrative and historiography from semantic (linguistic) limitations inherent in textual narratives, opening up to ways of engaging the broader semiotic (beyond linguistic) processes through various modalities such as image, sound, and touch. Working with games and playful interaction enables a different way of engaging historical contingency, causal structures and temporality. Instead of closed forms of narrative that portray history as an inevitable causal sequence, designing a game or playing a game immerses a learner in working in a counterfactual mode, thereby exploring complex forms of causal relations and discovering the role and importance of agency and choice. The game designers (in this case, students) had to actively address how some of these theoretical questions related to engaging the past, historiography, and narrative appear within the context of Minnette De Silva’s project. The design process becomes a “critical pedagogical praxis”.[xviii] Seen from a communication and informational perspective the games themselves are a form of “critical heuristics.”[xix] It was a way to critically engage these broader questions by developing an alternative rather than stopping at a mere critique. In the following section, I note three crucial aspects related to the nature of De Silva’s project that influenced the game design discussions.
De Silva’s project and questions of historiography: problems and affordances
In recent years Minette De Silva’s work has gained more global attention, particularly within scholarly circles. While more awareness about her work is desirable, looking at the contexts and ways her work is gaining attention is also essential. A simple Google search will show that the number of publications, blog articles, podcasts and information sources that refer to her work has increased considerably since 2016. At the same time, we also see events such as the Princeton Womxn in Design and Architecture (WDA) events in 2021, Hong Kong’s M+ museum lectures in 2019, and the MoMA exhibition on modern architecture foregrounding her work.[xx] Despite this surging interest in her work, most of her buildings have not survived developer-driven demolition in Sri Lanka. In addition, most of her buildings consist of personal housing and remain outside the usual heritage and preservation discussion frameworks. For cases like that of De Silva, a sensitivity among the general public towards the value of her work and what it represents within the broader cultural politics of Sri Lanka could bring forth different responses. This opens up the question of what it means to enable a general public with little knowledge about architecture or, for that matter, an understanding of how to value what architecture does beyond the context of a building to appreciate De Silva’s practice. In other words, it is essential to consider how it is possible to make De Silva’s project matter within their everyday narratives and what forms of learning can enable such a process.
Another interesting observation relates to how De Silva’s projects are narrativised within existing discourse, which points to the fact that an increased presence does not necessarily guarantee an answer to some of the epistemological (that is, knowledge-related) questions related to understanding the history of her work. This point says a lot about methodologies and epistemic questions of decoloniality. It also has a lot to say about approaching narrative methods as ways of enacting complex issues, rather than simply understanding them. While a discussion on this point is beyond the scope of this essay, I will briefly outline an example so that a general reader may see some relations to the development of the game heuristic.
De Silva’s practice of making homes provided a unique point of intersection for the interlocking questions of commitments, decisions, and tensions that mirror a nation’s struggles related to domesticity. For example, of the approximately thirty projects built during the first fifteen years of her practice (between 1947 and 1962), the majority were housing. Anoma Peris has mapped the complicated terrain of the project of domesticity in the context of post-colonial Sri Lanka.[xxi] The independence process in Sri Lanka took less the form of a revolution like in India, but was instead more a legal debate.[xxii] It was gradual and driven by slow constitutional reforms. The intellectual bourgeoisie––like De Silva’s parents, who had already acquired experience by serving in the legislature under British rule––played a significant role in the process. The domestication project was thrust forward by these elites whose ability to act as agents of resistance depended on the close connections they had to the hierarchies set in place by societal infrastructure gradually put into place by the British colonisers until Ceylon’s independence in 1948. These elites were the interpreters of the global culture for natives structurally segregated from the colonial rulers by language and culture. Considering this organisational apparatus, the project of domesticity was intrinsically linked to the lingering presence of epistemic colonialism. In other words, De Silva’s domestic buildings speak to the complexity of the decolonial question where, as Maria Lugones states, the “colonised” is not only something constructed by the coloniser “but as a being who begins to inhabit a fractured locus constructed doubly, who perceives doubly, relates doubly, where the sides of the locus are in tension, and the conflict itself actively informs the subjectivity of the colonized self in its multiple relations.”[xxiii] Her work points to the lack of a postcolonial moment and a long process where Sri Lanka grapples with the processes of colonial transmutations. The emphasis in these frameworks that invite engaging these tensions in her work should seek to maintain this multiplicity in understanding her process and not introduce multiplicity as something reduced to a “hybrid product.” For example, approaching her work as a case of tropical modern architecture, a South Asian postcolonial building, can, in turn, erase the complex ways in which colonial difference operates both within the building and its design process.[xxiv] As such, specific trends in narrativising her work in the context of questions posed from within prefigured epistemological categories (‘-isms’) such as post-colonialism, regionalism, tropical modernism, environmentalism, feminism etc., and the rhetorical strategies contained within these processes in some ways reduce ways of understanding the actual intersectional and transversal complexity of her oeuvre. For example, in certain instances, the overemphasis placed on her as a figure counteracts the possibilities of understanding her role as it emerges in relation to the tensions in the sites of her practice. After all, as Wineburg asks: “how can we nail down human motivation with any kind of precision?”[xxv]
Wineburg’s observation stems from mapping a general tendency amongst humans to locate cause in individual characteristics and interpersonal relations. Particular young learners are attuned to think of causality through their everyday personal experiences or interpersonal relationships and find it difficult to understand causality in relation to abstract structural issues. For example, in going through De Silva’s scrapbook, it was easy for most students to attribute her experiments with local materials and indigenous practices as part of her search for a “post-colonial identity”. Yet most students found it difficult to explore her decisions in relation to abstract themes and issues such as the changing nature of the political economic condition in Sri Lanka or to make arguments and causal connections that consider these abstract structural issues.[xxvi] Interactive storytelling systems as learning tools can counteract this natural tendency to oversimplify ideas about intention and causality, and introduce ways of understanding “overdetermination,” i.e., the notion that practices or actions are produced by causes of different magnitudes coming together in complex ways and that tracing them back is complicated.[xxvii] Instead of explaining these ideas theoretically, what better way to introduce them than by letting students find this out for themselves? The game sets engage these epistemic categories in ways such that when juxtaposed, players are prompted to question the levels at which her intentions and agency operate, as well as to work beyond these categorical frameworks or to challenge the very frameworks themselves.
De Silva’s autobiography is a central source of information for anyone who wants to understand her past. It is interesting not only in terms of content but also in terms of its communication form. In developing the game systems, it was vital to explore the content-form relationship in the book and question how the way the material is presented provides affordances to different ways of interacting with it. The book contains information about her early life and practice history up to the 1960s and takes the form of an informal scrapbook rather than a coherently written text. As such, the book contains multiple layers of information, numerous factual sources that take the form of letters, newspaper cuttings, certificates, institutional documents, photographs, scanned copies of published papers, bills, memo notes, sketches and postcards, all of which present the different voices of her clients and other collaborators. In addition, she has actively inserted images of herself amongst the photos of her work. All of these different elements allude to various events in her practice story. These events are a record of her changing life narrative, the narrative of a changing nation, and the narrative of changing global networks of power. These scattered informational sources are supplemented by her own reflections on her process many years after the period in which she compiled the book. This unresolved, woven quality of the text is of a performative nature and invites a more performative form of engagement. The game design process not only uses this book as a core source of information but has, in many ways, drawn from its open-ended form and juxtaposition tactics, amplifying this performative quality.[xxviii]
Narrative games around Minnette De Silva’s buildings as sites of learning
The process of learning with narrative games functions at two levels. Developing the prototype as a learning exercise allows students to externalise the different ways that they engage the theoretical questions presented in the earlier two sections. The four games represent their processes of learning and the limitations of their ways of thinking and doing. For example, it was challenging to create a proper balance between working out the playability of the system that generates the interaction and the limits to which one can work with the historical content. All the decisions made about the mechanics of the game, i.e., the interactive heuristic that influences the flow of play, the type of decision-making, and components of the game (cards, boards, etc.), are derived from the particular ways in which the designing group had problematised the relationship between learning, narrative and historiography, as well as how these questions appear in the context of De Silva’s work. At another level, the output of this process—playable games—becomes a learning tool for other students or members of the general public. The games can be played anywhere, whether as a supplement to a classroom lecture, in a self-learning session or as an activity at the kitchen table. The players of the games have to research, discuss, and collaborate to create a set of plausible stories and to collectively make critical judgements about how some narratives are more convincing than others. Learners engage with multiple layers of information by understanding events as representing an entanglement across objects and local, global, personal, social, economic, and political aspects of history. Although the text used in the prototypes is written in English, the amount of text is limited. The use of images sets up a framework for discussions in multiple languages.
The designers worked in four groups and the design process consisted of a back-and-forth between theoretical discussions and workshop sessions. The groups used either a card game or a board game format to represent the fictional world of one of De Silva’s buildings and and were asked to articulate why they chose one game format over the other.[xxix] The building sites each group chose depended on the amount of information available and the personal interest of the students in exploring specific aspects of the buildings. The initial interests of the group, such as the questions of craft or questions of abandonment provided a departure point for reframing the building through a narrative framework. The choices between these formats of card vs board games depended on the ways in which the students envisioned the part-whole relationships in the contexts of the story.
Three groups choose the card game format because of the possibilities that they offered for working from the parts towards a bigger narrative. In informational terms, each narrative line was conceptualised as corresponding with some frictions or issues De Silva negotiated through her practice and their relation to particular actors and elements. Challenges came in deciding which sub-narratives to choose, and how to portray these narrative elements in graphical form. For example, the designers questioned the level to which De Silva should appear within the sub-narratives. All the game systems have, in their own ways, placed her (as a figure) in the background while foregrounding the relations. The card format also enables multiple forms of physical interactions. Two groups chose to work with various ways to set up the card play on a three-dimensional plane, and one group decided to experiment with the possibilities of composing narrative layers in the format of three-dimensional structures. This, in turn, the games take on spatiality. In each telling of the story and combination of the sub-narratives, the larger narratives take a particular spatial form that allows for other ways of thinking about the relationships between elements. The group who chose the board game were interested in how the board could set up a fictional setting parallel to the abandoned house they saw at present. The board portrays the building as it was, enabling a juxtaposition of concerns across two timelines—the timeline of our present and the original moment when the building was built. In doing so, it allows a different way of discussing the questions related to abandonment and heritage in the context of domestic buildings. Navigating the board is prompted by simple text-fuse elements that end up as simple sentences. Yet, assembling these sentences generates dialogue and discussion as players work out the plausibility of the statement and its relation to the elements on the board. In their own way, the textual statements also connect the past and the present, where in some instances, it opens more questions.
We hope that the project, regardless of its drawbacks, contributes in its own little way to rethinking ideas about education and ways of learning to engage the presence of the past in order to work through the deepening complexities of the present world.
References
[i] Minnette De Silva, The Life & Work of an Asian Woman Architect (Colombo: Smart Media Productions, 1998). The book was compiled with the help of Architect Ashley de Vos and his office.
[ii]Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “Crafting the archive: Minnette De Silva, Architecture, and History“. The Journal of Architecture 22, no. 8 (2017): 1299–1336. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2017.1376341.
[iii] One recent example, among others, that develops such a discussion from within the discipline is the edited volume: Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). The discussion here is important not only because it maps how the relationship between narrative, historiography and architectural education are changing within the reforms of the field, but also at the same time points towards the limitations.
[iv] A note is necessary on the situated context of the first iteration of this experimental project. The group of students involved comprised multiple nationalities (German, Argentinian, Brazilian, Portuguese, and Indian) None of them have directly experienced Sri Lanka as a cultural context. The students were from both BSc and MSc levels and worked together for five months. None of the members in the group were native English speakers. Although there were encounters with Sri Lankans during the project none of them were directly involved in the design of these four game systems. The students’ experience of De Silva’s projects were primarily influenced by different forms of texts, images and other materials produced by Minnette De Silva as well as others who knew her or have studied her work. The nature of the games and the format in which design sessions are conducted can vary significantly according to the cultural contexts, the compositions of the group and the access to different forms of information and materials.
[v] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (New York: Bobs-Merrill, 1995). See also Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Vintage Books, 2010). See also: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1988).
[vi] Tony Fry, Clive Dilnot, and Susan C. Stewart, ‘Whither Design/Whether History’. In Design and the Question of History (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 8.
[vii] Hayden White, The Content of Form: Narrative, Discourse and Historical Representation. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990).
[viii] White, The Content of Form, 3-6. See chapter titled: “The Questions of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory, 26-58. In White’s formulation historicity relates to the notion of the past, whereas history is the part of the past that always gets captured by historians
[ix] Keith Jenkins. At the Limits of History: Essays on Theory and Practice. (London: Routledge, 2009), 9
[x] Paul Ricoeur. Narrative Time. In Mitchelle , W. (ed.) On Narrative. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 167.
[xi] Lloyd S Krame, “Literature, Criticism and Historical: the literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 101, quoted in Matthew W. Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott, ed., Playing with the Past: Digital Games and The Simulation of History (Bloomsbury: 2013), 359.
[xii] Hayden White, The Content of Form, ix.
[xiii] Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007). Trouillot draws on White’s framework and extends it to discuss the questions of presence and absences. See also: Carlo Ginzburg, Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
[xiv] Samuel Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
[xv] Samuel Wineburg, Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone). (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 91.
[xvi] Wineburg, Why Learn History, 7.
[xvii] Campbell and Eliott, Playing With The Past, 364.
[xviii] I use the term praxis with reference to Freire. See Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London: Penguin Classics, 2017), 60-62.
[xix] I use the term ‘critical heuristics’ as introduced by Werner Ulrich to refer to ‘heuristic’ support in the form of argumentation tools that make a difference in practice and which seek to enhance the ‘critical’ competence not only of well-trained professionals but also of ordinary people. See Werner Ulrich, A Brief Introduction to Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH) (2005). https://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/ecosensus/publications/ulrich_csh_intro.pdf
[xx] Minnette De Silva: Constructive Dialogues. Princeton School of Architecture, 2021. https://vimeo.com/577285337. The Museum of Modern Art. “The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985 | MoMA”. Accessed 5th January, 2023. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5439. Histories, Archives, and the Lack Thereof: Constructing Stories of Women in Architecture. Miller Theatre, Asia Society Hong Kong Centre, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-NO7bzDeQs.
[xxi] Anoma Pieris, Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The Trouser Under the Cloth. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 11.
[xxii] Marshall Singer, The Emerging Elite: A Study of Political Leadership in Ceylon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964), 6. Quoted in Nalani M. Hennayake, “The Postcolonial State, Power Politics and Indigenous Development as a Discourse of Power in Sri Lanka”, Sri Lanka Journal of Sociology 1, no.1, (2019): 21.
[xxiii] Maria Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism”, Hypatia 25, no. 4 (2010): 748. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40928654. While the essay revolves around further complicating the relationship between colonialism and gender it is important for this discussion because of how it points to the problematic relationship between colonialism and the way it operates in relation to epistemic frameworks and methods of knowing. It points towards the need to keep alive multiple readings of the complex subject position of the resistant self emerging from the colonies. The discussion maps out the need for a decolonial method (as opposed to a post-colonial method) that expands the ways to understand how epistemic forms of colonialism continue in complex ways. This relates to the growing discussion on the decolonial option and its methods, and the need to unlearn ways of working with methods as much as relearning other ways. It is argued here that these games afford such forms of un-learning and relearning. See also: Madina Tlostanova, “What is coloniality of knowledge?,” in The Design Philosophy Reader, ed. Anne-Marie Willis, (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018), 110-115.
[xxiv] Lugones, “Towards a Decolonial Feminism”, 755. Her original quote is as follows: “The emphasis is on maintaining multiplicity at the point of reduction—not in maintaining a hybrid product, which hides the colonial difference—in the tense workings of more than one logic, not to be synthesized but transcended.”
[xxv] Wineburg, Why Learn History, 111.
[xxvi] For example, it was interesting to see if some of De Silva’s decisions about building materials were less ideological choices than decisions taken in response to certain political circumstances such as restrictions to the economy.
[xxvii] Wineburg, Why Learn History, 115.
[xxviii] Though not necessarily related to narrative games, several scholars have explored the interactive relationships between what I would call the spatiality of the textual and the performative. Some recent examples amongst others are Hélène Frichot and Naomi Stead. 2022. Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2022) and Jane Rendell, Site Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010). Some of my earlier work on engaging the performativity of concepts that appear in a textual format and exploring other ways of interacting with a text through games can be found in the project Critical Ecology Matters, https://www.uni-weimar.de/projekte/criticalecologymatters/.
[xxix] Two initial frameworks for presenting the ideas of a card game and board game were developed by the author together with Florian Tudzierz and Leonie Link in the pre-prepration work for the course. Certain aspects of Chronoscouts and the Fact Fuse games produced by the Game Innovation Lab were helpful to think about the core heuristics of the narrative games. See: “Chrono Scouts and Fact Fuse” Game Innovation Lab, accessed June, 2022, https://gameinnovationlab.itch.io/chrono-scouts-fact-fuse. Games systems such as Rory’s story cubes and Dixit also provided inspiration. However, these ideas were significantly modified through group discussions within the project and by the project teams.