“Where there is architecture there is nothing else. And this “Nothing else” is spreading. The built buildings, the laid out streets and marked out parking spaces are not just taking place, they take over the place.”

To encounter today’s European urban complexity means to integrate diverse forms of cultural practice and diverse groups of people into processes for common cultural intangible and tangible results. We see the art project “The city of Abadyl” as a way of knowing the world — a methodology for exploring, understanding, and building human realities. Abadyl is a proposed city, a fantasy, a set of codes and models, a library of artefacts and prototypes and foremost it is it´s co-creators.

In the project “Journey to Abadyl” we set out to create an interactive experience based on a framework of play-rules, fiction and role-taking we call “The Anatomy of Choice”. Here participants are invited to a series of thematic Portals; each bridging from one world to another, from the factual to the fictional, from virtual and the real. Guided and aided by performers in a mixed reality space, participants experience a kind of computer game in a spatial format, linking what we already know and spotting the new.

We ask: What are the qualities at play through history constructing this spaces and who is invited? Our answer is an experience structured as a matrix in which the participants are exposed to distinct choices that include both moral, ethical, and physical dilemmas and challenges.

The Portals will be designed as thematic artistic elements – Ideal Space, The trick of the tale, Wanderlost, “The Residence Table”, People’s Choice, “Try walking in my shoes” – and function as an invitation to participate in the creation of events which can be experienced in the virtual city as well as in the staged events in Kødbyen. In this way people are given the opportunity to reflect on consequences of the growing social media reality seen in relation to the actual physical environment around us. The Portal format allows us to set up interventions and events during the 12th months of the project with different constellations (partners) and on different locations in Kødbyen. The culmination of the event will be the interactive performance event “Journey to Abadyl” in late 2017 where material from the Portals will be enacted and integrated.

We hope participants will go away feeling enchanted and empowered, challenged, moved, and inspired.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust