Unsettling Settlers: Intervention

February 28, 2020

The first in a series of free workshops, Greenwood had invited multi-disciplinary artist, Golboo Amani to host a play test and discursive event entitled Unsettling Settlers: Intervention. The goal of Amani’s project is to interrup the colonial narrative of the board game Settlers of Catan by employing strategies that strengthen players’ abilities to imagine critical alternatives and counter hegemonic narratives of settlement. In Unsettling Settlers: Intervention players work through strategies of allyship by trading and collecting renewable resources, blocking expansion and development, building treaties and reclaiming land on a virtual landscape.


Multi-disciplinary artist Golboo Amani is best known for her performance and social practice works. Amani utilizes familiar social engagements and patterns of performativity as ready-made sites for aesthetic intervention and critical engagement. Amni’s work often addresses the conditions of knowledge production that render epistemic violence as invisible, insignificant and benign. Much of their work focuses on interventions or alternatives to formal sites of pedagogy to include forms, contexts and content normally excluded from institutionalized knowledge production. Their work has been shown nationally and internationally in venues including the Toronto Biennial of Art, Art Gallery of York University, Creative Time Summit, Art Gallery os Ontario, Articule, XPACE Artist-Run Centre, Encuentro: Hemisphereic Institute, Union Gallery, Blackwood Gallery, Rhubarb Festival, FADO Emerging Artist Series, TRANSMUTED International Festival of Performance Art (Mexico City), 221A Artist-Run Centre, and the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art.

For more information on Golboo Amani, please visit her website or Instagram.