Under a Porcelain Sun. Courtesy of Studio Oleomingus.
To say that Studio Oleomingus simply makes video games is an understatement, one that doesn’t fully capture their intricate explorations of postcolonialism, architecture, memory, and the way we tell stories. The two-person game studio from India has developed a striking surrealist aesthetic using vivid colors, fantastical motifs, and what they call speculative architecture. The results are bold, dreamlike 15-20 minute experiences that breathe new life into the realm of literary magical realism associated with writers like Italo Calvino, Haruki Murakami and Jorge Luis Borges.
Based in Chala, India, Oleomingus is made up of Dhruv Jani and Sushant Chakraboty—the former handles the writing and visuals, while the latter does the programming; the pair usually works remotely, and every few weeks, they make six-hour train journeys between Ahmedabad and Daman to spend weekends working together. Jani, who trained as an exhibition designer, sees games as a way to advance his craft into new territory. “I started to realise there was far more room to negotiate these spaces and understand them better if they’re simply considered real, as sites for storytelling and discourse,” he tells SLEEK over Skype. “So, I started Oleomingus in its current form at a residency program, at a place called Khoj, when I started working with Sushant.”
In the Pause Between the Ringing.
Oleomingus’ latest title, The Indifferent Wonder of Edible Places, follows the work of a municipal building eater who consumes a tower, brick by brick. “You eat a set of buildings, and then you try and figure out the stories that were buried there on the computer,” explained Jani. “We wanted to talk about the consequence of deleting spaces entirely,” he continued, describing the plight of a 500-year-old mosque—the Barbri Masjid in Ayodhya—that was violently demolished by right-wing Hindu nationalists in 1992. Just last year, a court ruled that the land that once housed the mosque would go to the people who destroyed it. Edible Places is a response to “the grief of having to consume and efface built history and lived history” on the fringes of society—a universal sorrow shared by all countries familiar with both quiet gentrification and violent destruction.
Most of Jani’s writing revolves around a dense fictional mythology that he created specifically for Oleomingus’ games. “Part of it came from fear,” he says, after realising that creating games allowed him unprecedented authorial power over marginalised stories, some of which have flown under the radar of mainstream Indian history. “I found it was very easy to slip into appropriating other people’s languages, cultures, histories, and narratives, something that I didn’t want to do.” As a result, Jani came up with Mir UmarHassan, a fictional Gujarati poet who gently reshapes and blurs the historical source material from which Jani draws life.
Most of Oleomingus’ games are part of the studio’s enigmatic Somewhere project—a sprawling meta-narrative that uses what Jani describes as “concentric fiction”— a visual anthology of the circular, looping ways in which history is written. “A lot of … history is colonial history, it’s written by the coloniser, and it is read through a nationalist lens by rejecting the coloniser and replacing them with a neo-colonial nationalist interlocutor,” Jani said. “If we were to write our histories as interactive fiction, and make them playful…but also in the process remove authorship from the histories so they are not bound by veracity or authority, they would become more mythlike and more ridiculous.”
Right now, the pair is hard at work on their biggest project to date: Under a Porcelain Sun, a two-hour game that they’ve been putting off in order to participate in exhibitions around the world (including a commission, In the Pause Between the Ringing, for the V&A in London). Jani hopes to release Under a Porcelain Sun—the first Somewhere game to feature a more conventional choose-your-own-adventure style structure—in August. “We’re playing around with a lot of distorted movements across architectural spaces…walking into books and walking out of books, walking into paintings and into matchboxes…a degree of surrealism that we’ve been wary of entering into up until now,” he said.
One day, perhaps there will be an actual Somewhere game, but for now, it’s an open-ended journey. Just one constant remains: the stalwart presence of Mir UmarHassan, arguably the heart of Somewhere’s lifelike mythology. “The idea of searching for meaning through tremendous volumes of history, searching for identity…completion, or a boundary to call your own, are ideas we’re very fascinated by with these games,” Jani explained. “The search for Kayamgadh, the mythical city that is the heart of Somewhere, is a process where we try to examine the idea of faith, to have faith in a city that does not exist, or that might exist, but not yet exist…and what it does to the people who imbibe such faith.” Within the Somewhere world, Mir UmarHassan is the closest thing we have to Virgil—a needle guiding the thread of story—that just might change the way we understand history.
All images courtesy of Studio Oleomingus