According to estimates by the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration, up to 60,000 people will seek asylum in Norway this year alone, most of them from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of these newly-arrived people have little knowledge of where to go to find basic resources, not to mention where to make friends. How do you spread information among a constantly changing group of people who don’t have either the visibility or the vocality of the rest of a city’s population?

For Modes of Movement, one of the 2016 Oslo Triennale commissioned ‘intervention strategies’, the Belgian collective Ruimteveldwerk met with asylum seekers in Oslo to gather information and anecdotes about places they found useful or appealing. They then converted their findings into a city guide, which delineates fundamental resources like medical centers and shelters, alongside places where asylum seekers can simply meet one another and share stories and experiences.

Like the rest of the intervention strategies in the In Residence component of the Triennale, where each intervention is represented, Modes of Movement began months before the opening weekend and will continue past its closing dates. Ruimteveldwerk began by going around the Torshev neighborhood—where the majority of the city’s migrants are concentrated and a transit center is located—trying to set up workshops to talk with people.

But they quickly ran into difficulties, such as the changing demographics of the asylum seeker population. When they started the project, the transit center was mostly populated by adults and families. A few months later, the transit center hosted primarily unaccompanied minors. Moreover, Ruimteveldwerk sometimes encountered suspicion or a more general reticence to talk.

“We saw that communication wasn't always easy,” they tell me as we sit over a table covered with their city guide. “It was far more easy sometimes to just start playing football or play games.” This realization sparked the idea for a “gaming layer”: a card game that contains information about the shelters, medical centers, and other resources contained in the guide. 

“It's an old game with a big history that is familiar to a lot of cultures,” Ruimteveldwerk notes. “So a lot of people can relate to it. Everyone can play it, even if you're not interested in a city guide. Through playing it you can learn about the city and be interested in the city guide.”

As Ruimteveldwerk moves forward with the project, they plan to experiment with other types of games. They’ll place the table—which has chairs as well as a large “info” icon on a stand—in the Torshev center once the exhibition has closed. And while they’ve been distributing maps and the cards already, they hope to secure more funds later on to update the packs with new information.

“We're thinking about the possibilities of making it interactive over time so that [asylum seekers] can change locations themselves and add information into the template themselves,” they explain. “So that way it becomes their game that they control.”

Modes of Movement is an installation in In Residence, an exhibit of the 2016 Oslo Triennale, After Belonging. For more on the Triennale, check out our interview with the curators here, and stay tuned for more reports from Oslo.