The Ministry of Strange Affairs (MOSA) is a participatory storytelling performance for adults.
Set against the backdrop of a stiffening, monotonous reality, MOSA invites participants to become agents for the normalization of strangeness. Through guided gameplay, players explore the magic of the real world, forging meaningful relationships with people and their environment. By doing so, they help make the world a more flexible and flowing place, one connection at a time.
2022 - x
performative reality
People, costumes, missions, senses
PT, DE, FR
We wanted to understand why adults are so much more inhibited than children. Above all, how can we get them to play and what happens if they do?
We were looking for play as a ‘state of mind,’ which manifests itself when the player is immersed in a self-chosen, enjoyable activity within which they lose a sense of time and self-awareness and consequently want it to continue or be repeated (Gray, 2013; Brown and Vaughan, 2010).
All of these strategies are based on their potential to give adults an ‘alibi’ (or excuse) to play (Deterding, 2017), create an imaginary alternate reality where the weight of real-life is abolished, imagination and joy are awakened and inhibitions such as fear of inappropriate behavior are reduced so that adults can engage in more free play.
Our 6 strategic tools were groups of friends, physical art installation, storytelling and its subcategory of pizza-making as a storytelling tool, costumes, missions, and game structure and its subcategory of game masters.
How can we imagine the game in practice?
The agents were invited to join the Ministry of Strange Affairs as agents of strangeness in order to save the world from stiffening up, slowing down its oscillation, and consequently dropping out of its orbit.
The game was structured into two half-days. The first day was very much guided by me, the game master, to give the agents time to get acquainted with the story and their role. Dressed up as Missfish, I first told them the narrative of the game. They then created their costumes for their agent avatars and went into the streets of Lisbon on a mission. The day ended with a culinary moment at Silly Sally’s fabulous cooking show (that was me too), where reports were crafted with pizza ingredients.
On the second day, with the objective to give them space to play more freely in the context of MOSA, they revisited the findings of their mission from the previous day with Sally (me) or Intergalactic Reporter It (also me) to then collectively decide on what they wanted their next mission to be (d’Incau, 2024, pp. 35–45).
MOSA: ON TOUR
October 2025
Interactive play performance
With the participation of Gonçalo Fialho (PT),
Marieke Sytema (NL), Vittoria Quartararo (DE/IT)
Performissima, Paris, FR
The citizens of Paris were summoned to handle their strange affairs in a randomized, bureaucratically transparent process at the Ministry of Strange Affairs. Through this metademocratic process, they entered an extraction process of neo-logical messages which contribute to the greater good of production of strangenesses.
The board members presently in office are were: Miss Chief, the representative stranger of the Ministry, Miss T. Brain, deputy of the Neological Institute and organised randomiser of multi- linguadisciplinary associations, Miss Tère, the excecuty officer and right hand of Carlos, the fourth of the board, who is just himself.
