Europa, Mon Amour (2016 Brexit Edition) forms Chapter 8 of Lawrence Lek’s Bonus Levels (2013-2016), a series of site-specific video games based on alternate versions of real places. Conceived as a virtual novel, Lek uses simulation as a medium to assemble collages of objects and places drawn from reality. The project is usually presented as a double-screen installation with video game and narrative walkthrough video displayed side-by-side.
In this edition, with the UK just cast out of the EU, Dalston in East London has degenerated into a post-apocalyptic utopia. Come and explore this drowned world of the near future: filled with forgotten nightclubs, neon-lit music venues, Election booths, Turkish snooker clubs and luxury penthouses. Building upon Lek’s original commission for Open Source 2015, this site-specific simulation brings together multiple histories of the area into a single zone. As players roam around, a voiceover extracted from Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour speaks to them about the nature of memory. It is a gradual, but relentless, sense of forgetting that comes with any form of urban transformation.
