Alice Bucknell (US, 1993) & Sahej Rahal (IN, 1988)
Residency period: May-July 2026
Alice Bucknell is a North American artist and writer based in Los Angeles whose work uses game engines and speculative fiction to explore video games as tools for engaging with complex systems, relationships, and knowledge structures. Their practice addresses the limits of scientific thinking, the imaginative potential of play, and ecological perspectives challenging binaries such as human versus environment. Bucknell is the founder of New Mystics, a platform that investigates the intersections of magic and technology and organized New Worlds at Somerset House Studios.
Their work has been presented internationally at venues including Copenhagen Contemporary, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and the Centre Pompidou (Paris). Their writing appears regularly in ArtReview, frieze, and e-flux architecture. They currently teach at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles.
Sahej Rahal is an artist and storyteller based in Mumbai whose work weaves fact and fiction into counter-mythologies that question the narratives shaping the present. Drawing on local legends and science fiction, he creates myth-worlds inhabited by indeterminate beings emerging from the cracks of civilization. These unfold through sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, video games, and AI programs.
Rahal’s work has been exhibited widely, including at the Biennial of Moving Images (Geneva), the Gwangju, Liverpool, Kochi, and Vancouver Biennales, MACRO Museum (Rome), Kadist (San Francisco), ACCA (Melbourne), and CCA (Glasgow).
At La Becque, Alice Bucknell and Sahej Rahal will expand an ongoing dialogue between their respective game projects, Earth Engine and Distributed Mind Test, to explore new approaches to worldbuilding, storytelling, and game design. While Earth Engine functions as a generative architectural system that continually reshapes environmental space, Distributed Mind Test imagines the decentralized cognitive agents that might come to inhabit it. In close collaboration, the artists will probe the friction between speculative ecologies and improvisational mythologies, devising methods that challenge conventional structures of gameplay. Their residency will focus on three key areas: procedural and emergent worldbuilding systems; gameplay as a form of collective ritual; and co-creation at the outer edges of player agency. Through this shared framework, Bucknell and Rahal seek to cultivate alternative modes of play, interaction, and narrative that expand beyond the scope of their individual practices.