Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Yo Quiero Aquí Melinka is a board game created collaboratively with islanders from Las Guaitecas, located in Aysén Region, Chile. The island stands out for its natural wealth, which has suffered an overexploitation of its resources, both due to the consumption of its inhabitants and the arrival of extractive industries. Given this, isolated reuse strategies from islanders are observed to get the most of what is at hand. The game arises from the collective desire to generate purposeful spaces for dialogue, in an effort to overcome the focus towards the identification of problems and their possible causes, which tend to dilute and/or externalize responsibilities and provide few tools on what can be done. In this way, the idea arises of building a playful device for dialogue, which allows to imagine proposals for the island. In this, the interest is not put in the feasibility of the ideas, but in the performativity of the conversations, which allow to propose new relationships in the territory, expanding the imagination about what could take place on the island. After different co-creation meetings with a group of islanders and meetings to test the game with the rest of the community, the rules and objectives of the game are defined, in which its creators highlight its ability to enable other forms of meeting and exchange. This is by having to put oneself in the place of the other, search among the resources present on the island and gaining experience of negotiation in search of future transformations.