RETURN TO SENDER
🎵 A playlist about walls, resistance, death and love
“Sometimes we need to disrupt usage to bring attention to a cause.” Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use, 2019
A “racket” is an object that consists of netting stretched in an almost oval open frame with a handle attached that is used for striking a ball, usually in a tennis court game. In that sense, “to play” is the expression by which we can define why a racket is being used. In a tennis game, one can’t hold the ball in their hands (other than serving), or they will drop points. In a tennis video game, the code itself won’t allow us to hold the ball in the first place. Despite the 1993 conviction by the OPCW that prohibited the use of tear gas chemicals, police have regularly used tear gas to disperse crowds occupying the public space.
Return to Sender is a game about disruption. It brings one of the protesters’ innovative spatial tactics: the use of a tennis racket to throw tear gas away. Not only does it disrupt the materiality of the racket, but it also disrupts the policing order who does not anticipate such resistance. As a designer, I want to disrupt the complicit narrative that echoes the police in the gamespace. In Return to Sender, Police are intentionally unseen. And they are unseen by their own urban tactics of control which is the use of barricades. A game in which the player will never lose (or win). As health is running low, the hands of care will stretch to support the player with the needed equipment.
A construction of army wall dividing Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Cairo, 2011