SKULKESKOLEN presents The Fifth Fire by Tom K Kemp

Fire has gone on strike. Until a new agreement between people and fire is reached, nothing burns: no fossil fuels, no wildfires, no factories, no cigarettes.

The Fifth Fire is a participatory role-playing game for 6–20 players who take on the roles of fire, human negotiators, and the world itself, collectively imagining the consequences of the strike, the demands of fire, and the terms of any new agreement. Every session is a political simulation, producing a different, post-strike version world.

Two public sessions will run during SKULKESKOLEN, each lasting approximately half a day and open to public registration.. Bringing together general participants, invited guests, regional specialists, and programme contributors, each session creates a temporary collective of up to 20 players,ensuring a diversity of perspectives and experiences. Using simple lo-fi, low-tech mechanics, the game is accessible to  anyone aged 12 and up, regardless of prior experience.

At its core, The Fifth Fire asks what kind of relationship humans have built with fire, and what it might mean to renegotiate that relationship entirely. Framing fire simultaneously as a geologic force, a colonial technology, a metabolic process, and a condition of extraction, the game invites participants to collectively reimagine Bergen’s history of fires, as well as its relationship to the petrochemical industry and the forms of life around it.

Tom K. Kemp is a British artist who employs roleplaying game design, animation and filmmaking to tell collaborative stories about complexity and the humans who constitute it. Working through the roleplaying game form to combine political simulation and speculative analysis into semi-improvised group storytelling, participants are invited to parse systems, complicate common narratives, and synthesise an array of knowledge into plot, dialogue, diagram and performance.

The Fifth Fire is Tom’s fifth roleplaying game, and is currently on a playtesting tour around the US and Europe before being formally published later this year. He is currently developing it at the CAPC Bordeaux as part of Fluxus Magnetic Residencies. 

Tom has previously worked with the EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, La Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel, CAPC Bordeaux, and QUAD, Derby. Residencies include Cité des Arts International, Paris, Triangle-Astérides, Marseille, and Rupert, Vilnius.

As part of Another Sun – a curatorial programme on the poetics and politics of the subsurface – Bergen Kunsthall presents SKULKESKOLEN, a five-day collective study bringing together artists and researchers from 2–6 September 2026. Through workshops, field trips, screenings, performances, role-playing games and other participatory forms, the programme explores how inherited relations to land, geology and extraction might be reorganised.

Participants include Abdalla Eltayeb, Anne Marie Deacy, Ase Brunborg Lie, Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan, Dylan Kerr, Eimear Walshe, Hanni Kamaly, Ina Hagen, Karina Sletten, Katarina Dorothea Isaksen, Kathryn Yusoff, Dr. Memory Biwa, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Olan Monk, Tom K. Kemp and others to be confirmed.

SKULKESKOLEN is co-curated by Bergen Kunsthall Live Curator Jade Meili Barget and curator and professor Nora O’ Murchú, developed with the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Limerick. 

——Access—— Bergen Kunsthall can be accessed from street level and has gender-neutral accessible toilet facilities. For more information, please visit https://www.kunsthall.no/en/visit-us/access/ If you have any questions or requests, please contact bergen@kunsthall.no, our staff will do their best to assist. Bergen Kunsthall follows a no-tolerance policy against discrimination and harassment on the basis of ethnicity, gender expression, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, class, age or dis/ability- and ask our staff, artists and visitors to do the same.