Wetland Games: Activating Pluriversal Perspectives

Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Raphael Mathevet, Indrė Umbrasaitė, Alexander Eriksson Furunes. Wetland Games: Activating Pluriversal Perspectives. Stage set for Role-Playing Game, CGI, animation, game-performance

19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Carlo Ratti

May 10 – November 23, 2025

As the Venice Biennale has opened last week, Gediminas Urbonas—artist, researcher, and professor at the Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program at MIT —is sharing his thoughts on the project, Wetland Games. Along with his partner Nomeda Urbonas – an artist, researcher, and affiliate at ACT – the duo comprise Urbonas Studio and are participating at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Carlo Ratti, professor of the practice of urban technologies and planning in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning.

Gediminas Urbonas recently sat down with Marissa Friedman, ACT’s Marketing and Communications Manager, to discuss the exhibition. The Urbonases’s project—a data-rich, role-playing game about wetland ecology—isn’t your average climate installation. Wetland Games is based on scientific work and experiments in climate focused games, and uses over 20 years of environmental and socioeconomic data to simulate real-life ecological dynamics in areas like the Camargue Wetlands in France.

 

“We are working on a project called Wetland Games, which has been selected by the curatorial team of the Biennale for the main exhibition. It’s a so-called serious game,” Urbonas explains. “It models how diverse economic activities—reed harvesters, duck hunters, fishers, rice farmers, or tourists—transform landscape and negotiate with non-human agents like birds or plants as active stakeholders. It explores how these roles interconnect and how climate change, especially salinization, is impacting their livelihoods.”

The game projects future scenarios based on player decisions about land use, water management, and ecological priorities. Built in collaboration with French biodiversity specialist Raphael Mathevet, the project challenges modern humans to re-negotiate their dominance in favor of broader ecological diplomacy. To communicate these complex systems, Wetland Games will be experienced through images, animation, and a game-performance session at the Biennale.

Above images: Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Raphael Mathevet, Indrė Umbrasaitė, Alexander Eriksson Furunes. Wetland Games: Activating Pluriversal Perspectives. Stage set for Role-Playing Game, CGI: Umbrasaitė, Urbonas, Dimitrios Moutafidis. 2025 © The authors.

“We’re presenting it in two forms—animations and prints, and performative event,” says Urbonas. “Players wear symbolic masks and props made from bioregional materials to transform into stakeholders—farmers, birds, plants. It’s about embodied cognition and ecological empathy. It’s a cognitive and tangible transformation at once. It isn’t just a digital simulation—it’s performative, strategic, and reflective of real governance conflicts in places like the Camargue Wetlands in France.”

A former MIT student, Terry Kang (BS ’22), together with his colleague Thomas Lee Harriett, helped digitize the game for mobile platforms, enabling remote and real-time multiplayer sessions. “It’s a sophisticated engine, but grounded in data, research, and storytelling,” adds Urbonas. “We needed to make it accessible for real stakeholders—landowners, policymakers, scientists—who can’t always gather in person and see long term effects of their decisions.”

 

Focusing on brackish water environments—estuaries and lagoons where freshwater rivers meet the salty sea—Wetland Games, which was launched  last  fall during the Urbonases collaboration with LUMA Arles and their curator Martin Guinard,  draws attention to territories that have long attracted human settlement. These regions, teeming with biodiversity, appear wild at first glance, though history reveals a different story. Over centuries, these wetlands have been deeply shaped by human intervention—managed, inhabited, and altered—revealing a web of ecological and socioeconomic interdependency.

The urgency of this model becomes clear when examining current challenges: rising sea levels and soil salinization are disrupting centuries-old practices like rice farming, livestock grazing, and even the growth of reeds. The delicate balance of brackish water—once a natural fluctuation—is now being upended. As freshwater sources shrink due to glacial melt and saltwater continues to rise, entire territories face ecological transformation.

 

In some regions, like parts of France’s Camargue, the government has conceded—declaring the situation beyond control, too vast and complex for infrastructure to manage. In contrast, Venice has attempted to engineer its survival, though its lagoon’s geologic nature makes such solutions unique and not easily replicable elsewhere.

This narrative, both cautionary and visionary, challenges us to rethink diplomacy, reimagine coexistence, and redefine who gets a seat at the table when the future of our shared environments is at stake.

 

A performative game session planned for October 2025 is focusing on multi-natural intelligence and pluriversal approaches in diplomacy and decision making in environmental planning of the wetlands. Presented in a form of a role-playing game the event is immersed in computer generated interactive projection and a physical stage set with participants. The emerging learning environment will workshop conflicts between diverse stakeholders in a wetland according to the changing climate and discuss decisions that humans and non-humans make imagining the future. The event builds on experiments in climate focused games, and on the interdisciplinary scientific works on Camargue marsh in France. By staging the impacts of diverse factors: sea level and salinity dynamics, volatile climate and economy informing decisions made by various “caretakers” of the wetland, including birds and plants, this event aims to provoke understanding of socio-ecosystems and sustainability respecting the plurality of wetland beings’ perspectives.

Above images: Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Raphael Mathevet, Indrė Umbrasaitė, Alexander Eriksson Furunes. Wetland Games: Activating Pluriversal Perspectives. Installation view, 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2025. Image: Urbonas Studio.

Project information:

Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Raphael Mathevet, Indrė Umbrasaitė, Alexander Eriksson Furunes. Wetland Games: Activating Pluriversal Perspectives. Stage set for Role-Playing Game, CGI, video, game-performance. In collaboration with Terry Kang, Stacked and Thomas Lee Harriett (programming), Serge Rompza, NODE Berlin (design), Samuel Michaelsson, Dimitrios Moutafidis, Mykyta Khudiakov (CGI), Gabrielė Urbonaitė, Nojus Drąsutis (camera). 2025 © The authors.

Special thanks to Martin Guinard and Salma Mohtari, LUMA Arles, Matthieu Duperrex and architecture students, ENSA Marseille.

Supported by LUMA Arles; MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology; Vilnius academy of Arts NEB Research Centre; La Saison de la Lituanie en France 2024; Lithuanian Council for Culture

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