GRID GAME (2025) is a playable board game for viewers to engage and interact with. The objective of this game is to design the best city within the provided 12×12 grid board using the wooden building-like blocks. To achieve this, up to 5 players (performers) or 5 teams must complete challenges, play minigames, trade resources, ideate placement strategies, negotiate with other players, and be lucky. It is an expansive installation that can be played in a small room as well as throughout a complete city.
Grid Game questions the relationship between competition and play, and challenges the preconceived purpose of a work of art as an active utilitarian object aimed at play. Its loose rules invite players to stick to a social contract, or perhaps break free and do their will. The game includes polemic minigames for players to both play and reflect on. Every rule, action, and intention is deliberately thought to spark an opinion and a discussion.
The artist’s ongoing exploration of the city, interlocked with a strong desire towards play, led to the creation of this project. 21 wooden building-like blocks are available to design the perfect city. 65 bricks (coins) buy almost anything and can be trade among players. 15 orange traffic cones are used to reserve spots on the board. 23 terracota labour tokens are needed to express labour is the scaffold of society. 14 transportation tokens are included to give the city a livable status. Will players team-up or plot against each other?
Grid Game, 2025 (detail)
Falconeris Marimón is a Mexican/ Colombian Queer conceptual artist based in Melbourne/Naarm, where he studied his Bachelor of Fine Arts (Sculpture) at RMIT. Born and raised in Mexico City, Marimon is interested in bustling, busy cities where millions of individuals share stories and connect on multiple levels. His work spans installation, performance, and sculpture while investigating symbolic semiotics, trangression of ideas, and the nature of play. Falconeris’s art practice is characterized by his use of the urban landscape as a medium of creation, where ideas and concepts expand. Found objects or city materials as he calls them (road signs, tourist maps, bricks, and leaves) appear in his practice widely. Through these, the duality between strict order and chaos within the gridscape is performed and celebrated.
The artist’s signature style, the Performative Installations, are sculptural objects activated by performance. These reflect his deep curiosity about ubiquitous public experiences. Through his focus on wonder and charisma, he creates art that challenges and inspires the viewer to reconsider their positionality as individuals in this communal game called “the city”. Additionally, his artworks are inspired by his local surroundings, his cultural heritage/ traditions, and the spectrum between these, narrating diasporic personal stories.
Praxis, Patience, Perform & Play are his 4 Ps, central to Marimon’s practice.
