Untitled Bingo transforms traditional bingo into a critical examination of institutional language. Players receive bingo cards filled with bureaucratic euphemisms extracted from actual Frontex complaint documents: “deprivation of life” (death), “irregular movement” (displacement), “processing” (detention). As these euphemisms appear on screen, players mark their cards. It takes around 5 mins to cross out the words in the cardboard, allowing for many games during the usual gallery hours. The data used for the game is taken from the complaint mechanism form that Frontex, the European Union border control uses in their document. Language here is treated as data. What are the epistemic consequences of that missing data? What is central to the use of language to understand that words are a form of collective care? What happens when we pay attention to the words we use to describe what is happening in the word?
While the world “death” appears as the free space on every card, it never appears during gameplay; systematically erased from bureaucratic vocabulary. This creates an impossible, endless game where players experience growing frustration as completion becomes unreachable, making linguistic violence tangible through embodied experience. Players realise that the game is endless and organically start discussing that missing aspect, activating questions of collective care that go beyond individual gameplay to examine how institutional language shapes our understanding of human suffering and our collective responsibility to those affected by border violence.
Featured in An Asterism* Curated by Alison Burstein at Sheila C. Johnson Design Center in New York -May 2022
https://amt.parsons.edu/finearts/2022-mfa-thesis/paula-martin-rivero/
Paula Martin Rivero 