Baltic Warriors – Juhana Pettersson

Photo from Baltic Warriors Sopot by Pawel Matuszewski

Baltic Warriors is a transmedia project about eutrophication in the Baltic Sea. One larp was produced in 2014 and seven in 2015 as part of the project. The larps were produced by Kinomaton Berlin and Goethe-Institut Finnland.

Baltic Warriors Project

Producer: Sarita Sharma

Creative Producer: Harmke Heezen

Baltic Warriors Larps

Creative Director: Mike Pohjola

Producer: Juhana Pettersson

Social Media and Web Director: Cecilia Dolk

Writer and Designer: Kaisa Kangas

Local Producers

Tallinn: Aapo Reitsak

St. Petersburg: Olga Vorobyeva

Sopot: Piotr Milewski

Kiel: David Pusch & Maite Ruizymoreno

Copenhagen: Claus Raasted

Stockholm: Cecilia Dolk

Description

Excrepted from the Baltic Warriors website:

The Baltic Sea is one of the most polluted seas in the world, suffering from large ‘dead zones’ without oxygen. Although the sea is surrounded by nine developed countries, efforts to save it have proved to be insufficient. Baltic Warriors aims to explore the powers that are active in environmental politics and inspire new ways of thinking.

“Raising awareness is not enough for us”, lead designer Mike Pohjola says. “In a Baltic Warriors event, you will be one of the people working on this issue and after the event, the problems of the Baltic Sea will be part of your direct experience.”

Because this type of larp is a new thing, the internationalism of Baltic Warriors is on an unprecedented scale. Taking larp from one country to the next is already very unusual, but in Baltic Warriors, the game will tour seven countries, and the games will form one unified storyline going from one game to the next.

“Perhaps in the future, larps will go on tour all the time. But right now, we’re doing something that hasn’t really been done before”, Pohjola says. Each game is based on local issues and done together with local organizers to ensure that participants will get to engage with issues directly relevant to each country.

According to our analysis, a core problem of talking about these issues is that they’re invisible. To solve this problem, we have decided to use the brute metaphor of viking zombies to represent eutrophication. In the world of the larp, eutrophication and zombies are one and the same. This allows us to create concrete situations that are easier to grasp in the context of the game than real-life eutrophication.