au JUS is a project space collectively run through role play and collective worlding. The project establishes a zone for prefigurative play and (re)enactment as research. The three-story building consisting of a residency apartment, a white cube gallery, and a black cube basement offers a site to explore LARP over extended periods and in communication with its local context and public. The archetypical off-space becomes a projection screen for other forms of public life. Motivated by the urgency and desire to prefigure actual transformations taking form beyond the realm of fiction, the project facilitates the spawning of temporary worlds as laboratories for thoughts. What do you envision in this space? Why would you come here? Who could you become here?

Offering its inhabitants and visitors a zone of radical imagination as well as a community to probe and test ideas collectively, the project carves out temporal, spatial, or contractual architectures in which alternative modes of cohabitation and collaboration can be explored.

So far the group has used role play to experiment with its own narration and as a method of maintaining an ongoing open organizational structure. In the context of my research the project will allow me to share and test Role Play as a research methodology. It will also allow for more long duration and locally situated works as well as a challenge to effectively communicate the narrative layer to a passing public and find ways to offer them access.