Play Laboratory_Water and the City
Game, Participatory Methodologies
Date
Jan 2025 ~ Sep 2025 In development
Function
Karen Steinman, Nina Lund Westerdahl, Fernanda Tosta, Lara Paim, Thibault Schiemann.
Sponsorship
Nordiskkulturfond
An international project bridging São Paulo and Copenhagen to address the water-city disconnect using urban play as a social and political tool. How can play be used to uncover urban water issues, question policies, and forge new connections with the environment? Why São Paulo and Copenhagen? Different elements. Through an artistic residency Brazilian and Danish artists we explored play-informed research to uncover urban water issues, question policies, and forge new connections with the environment. The recent climate disasters—record-breaking droughts, wildfires and floods—urgently call for a reevaluation of how cities relate to water. This project tackles the issue through a dual-city game framework, linking the urban water challenges of São Paulo and Copenhagen to highlight their interconnectedness, presenting a decolonial approach that reframes local issues as collective global concerns. It goes further by advocating for urban play, artistic research, and performance as means to deepen our connection to water and the urban environment.
Why play? By fostering new embodied narratives, playing not only raises awareness but also encourages empathy, imagination, and a sense of belonging. It invites participants to think, feel, and act on how societies relate to water, aiming to establish play as a legitimate and impactful tool for urban dialogue.
[ gallery ]
Brazilian Marquetry [Jigsaw Puzzle]
Game, Participatory Methodologies
Date
Out ~ Nov 2025
Function
Fernanda Tosta
Assistance
João Millan
Sponsorship
Sesc Vila Mariana
The marquetry course offered an immersive collective experience in which participants co-created a single large puzzle from individually crafted parts. Each person designed and executed four marquetry pieces, all connected by a continuous line that crossed personal boundaries to form one unified visual narrative. Guided by the theme of Brazilian fauna and flora, the final puzzle became a mural exhibited at the hosting institution, transforming individual gestures into a shared artwork. This collective artistic process fostered an understanding of both hard and soft skills essential to collaboration—precision, patience, listening, negotiation, and trust—while challenging participants to develop technical mastery of marquetry within a group project. The exercise could easily belong to a maker reality show, yet it unfolded within cultural spaces, revealing how adequate time and space are crucial in cultivating these abilities. Hosted by the Art and Technology Laboratory of Sesc Vila Mariana, the course demonstrated how artistic environments can nurture collaborative intelligence through making, process, and shared authorship.
Why play? Playing this game is effective for team building because it requires shared decision-making, coordination, and trust, transforming individual skills into a unified result through collaboration and collective responsibility.
[ gallery ]
Sobraprima Game -
[Painting on Wood]
Game, Participatory Methodologies
Date
Sep ~ Nov 2025
Function
Fernanda Tosta
Assistance
Karen Steinman.
Sponsorship
Sesc Vila Mariana
Playing with wooden games can produce vast types of experiences, stimulating our creative capacity through feelings that the distinct mechanics can generate – desire and pleasure, anxiety and relief, curiosity and knowledge. Games are interactive systems capable of addressing the deepest themes of human existence; they can be detailed and sensitive to the choices and actions of the players and artists who create them, exploring ways to establish open, processual, and collaborative communication. During the classes, we learned about playful interaction, discuss the systematization of game rules, and their contextualization in the classroom.
Why play? This game invites players to engage through touch, decision-making, and experimentation, turning material interaction into a meaningful experience. Rather than offering fixed outcomes, it encourages interpretation, responsiveness, and collective participation. By activating attention, perception, and dialogue, the game operates as a space where learning emerges through action, making play a tool for reflection and exchange.
[gallery]
Sobraprima Chalk -
Game, Participatory Methodologies
Date
Out ~ Nov 2025
Function
Fernanda Tosta,
Help
Karen Steinman, Lara Paim.
Sobraprima Chalk is an abstract game that combines the elegance of geometry with the power of collective play. In this version, participants are invited to create a Sobraprima board directly on the ground using chalk. The geometric shapes of Sobraprima become symbols of water flows, reservoirs, and barriers within the city. Based on tic-tac-toe, players can embody different "forces" that shape urban water. We use corresponding geometric figures, such as rain, river currents, drought, or human infrastructure.
Why play? At the end of the game, participants are invited to observe the drawing left on the ground—a spontaneous illustration of an affective cartography about how water interacts with systems created by humans. The geometry reveals patterns of cooperation, resistance, and flow—reflecting the relationships between water and the city.
[gallery]
Sobraprima Cards -
Game, Participatory Methodologies
Date
Ago 2025
Function
Fernanda Tosta.
Sobraprima Cards is a portable version of the Sobraprima game, originally made of wood, created to transform words into geometric imagination and shared intuition. Ideal for meetings, workshops, and creative circles, the game invites the symbolic reading of shapes and the collective construction of meanings. The objective is to arrange your cards creatively so that other players can interpret the word you are representing, while simultaneously interpreting the compositions of others, using a set of word cards that indicate various elements such as flows, natural elements, urban aspects, or other concepts/objects. Each participant receives a set of cards with different geometric shapes. The rules are light and intuitive: the game takes place in 4 rounds, each with increasing levels of difficulty. In the end, the winner is the one who accumulates the most points by guessing and connecting.
Why play? Sobraprima Cards is a game about imagining the invisible — translating the flows into a poetic and visual language of shared creation.
Conversadeiras
Podcast
Spotify
Function
Fernanda Tosta.
Conversadeiras Podcast / The Art of Encounter Through Podcasts: In each episode of Conversadeiras, three voices come together to discuss thoughts at the intersection of art, design and technology—weaving questions with ideas and intuitions, creating maps for possible futures and expanding the boundaries of these fields. The podcast is a way to showcase a network of creatives who orbit around similar projects and works.
-
https://www.instagram.com/conversadeiras.xyz
https://open.spotify.com/show/6gRYBD3nTU3zzmNQEDJIvd?si=fab4e58651dc41b4
Um Vestido para Sankofa
Publishing
Author
Tatiana Costa de Souza
Illustrations
Fernanda Tosta
“When words lose their color and silence threatens to swallow memories, Sankofa emerges—made of scraps of history and courage. Stitched together with ancestral thread and embroidered with forbidden dreams, her dress awakens memories, provokes laughter, and defies oblivion. In this poetic and insurgent fable, enchantment unites with critique, and language becomes a territory of struggle and liberation.”
Buy at Amazon - https://encurtador.com.br/qYGx