The Outburst of the Digital Swamp - 2023

The Overkill festival is a playful art festival celebrating art house video games, interactive art and films as tools to engage in social challenges. The program of the festival regroups an exhibition, workshops, talks, experimental live performances and screenings. In 2023 The Overkill festival is also the stage of a LARP (live action role play) that each visitor can be part of.

The program brings local, national and international artists and creators together and is curated by Aike Lütkemöller and Marie Janin from Sickhouse with the support of guest curator Kostis Stafylakis, playful curator Zuraida Buter and artist researcher Erik Peters. The LARP, The Horde : Goblin Mode is a co-creation of Kostis Stafylakis and Theo Triantafyllidis.

THEME 2023 :

The outburst of the digital swamp

Rather than evading the (digital) wetlands, The Overkill wishes to design a route through its muddy paths. Artists navigating the Postdigital constellation think of the swamps as a playground to hybridise, as material under transformation and a womb for monstrous mutation. Today the swamp is reconsidered as a space for agency, it is inhabited by amphibious entities and exiled varieties of the self, the swamp is a liquefying space expanding on the different ecosystems.

The Overkill festival invites these hybrid and mixed media artists, accustomed to the porous and dripping networks of the everglades and welcomes everyone to venture into unstable fantasy spaces. Influenced by the proliferation of memes, wet aesthetics, derailed futures, “phygital”* morphologies and mixed fairy tales, these networks are to be navigated in daring ways, taking on a role and playing on the scenarios of an imminent reconfiguration of the planet.

* phygital : a combination of physical and digital