A collaborative project between Felix Ackermann, Ken Kirton and myself. The project entailed developing a fictional character and proving its existence to a given audience. Our character was Lisa Williams, who was the result of Enzo Mari’s game ‘Living’.

Enzo Mari’s Living game

Enzo Mari’s Living consists of a deck of 80 cards, broken up in sets of 10. Each individual deck represents a particular piece of information from a persons life, and is dealt out to the participating group. Collectively the cards are the foundation of a fictional character.

I live in…
I am a…
I live with…
I own a…
My neighbour is…
My wife/husband is…
My house is near…

Enzo Mari first used the cards during a course of workshops and lectures at the Urban Planning Laboratory of the Architecture faculty of the University of Milan. Each student was asked to not only create a fictional character but also build his or hers life, understand his/hers history, friendships, daily routines etc. From understanding their fictional character each student was then asked to design their fictional characters ideal home.

From the cards Mari distributed he defined the identity of each student and began to build real life stories. He outlined the personalities, the relationships and the hierarchies of the characters, as well as the value and the meaning of places and objects: he created complex scenarios that became the foundation of the residential projects he developed afterwards.

Character development

We were given the following cards: I live in the rocky mountains ‘I am a Mayor’, ‘Ilive with three female friends’, ‘I own a big tree’, ‘My wife is a nurse’, ‘My neighbour is a General’, ‘My house is near a swimming pool’, ‘I live in…’

We began by developing our character through a rough A4 sketch, keeping in mind the ten cards we were presented with. Having built an image of our fictional character we still felt that we needed to understand more about her life and therefore further developed Lisa’s life through a game of consequence between the three of us. We first developed our character through drawing.

During this development, a love story became apparent between our main character Lisa Williams and her neighbour Archibald Mooney. However, Lisa was unaware of Archibald’s strong feelings towards her and the story ended with him spying on her.

In order to prove the existence of our character we arranged for a bouquet of flowers to be delivered to our critique, addressed to Lisa Williams, to establish her existence within the subconscious of the group before we presented. For the presentation we read the story out loud, only revealing the name Lisa Williams untill the very end and watched the class realise the truth behind the undelivered flowers.

Recording the process

We chose to letterpress the story, which not only continued our collaborative process but also became a juxtaposition to Lisa Williams digital creation. The spelling mistakes in the story have not been corrected to stay true to the process.