The Bureaucratic Escape Room

The Bureaucratic Escape Room is an immersive role-play installation that creates a fictional bureaucratic institution. Upon arrival, participants enter a fictional world of waiting rooms, appointments, forms, phone calls and administrative protocols. Audiences take on different roles within the institution, experiencing bureaucracy from different perspectives within the same system.

Developed through artistic research conducted in Rotterdam and Manchester, the project draws on conversations with residents, people navigating bureaucratic systems, frontline workers, policymakers and academics. Rather than observing bureaucratic systems from the outside, participants experience them from within.

What starts as a familiar office environment slowly unfolds into a surreal experience. As the installation unfolds, the boundary between reality and fiction starts to blur, inviting participants to question the systems they navigate (and maintain) in their daily lives and imagine how they might be different.

About Merel Smitt

Merel Smitt is an interdisciplinary artist based in Rotterdam. Her live-art projects take place at the intersection of performative interventions, socially engaged art and cultural activism. Her work is often site-specific and co-created with communities and invites audiences to actively take part. Through shared experiences, she creates methodologies to reclaim spaces, disrupt systems and build platforms for exchange, gathering, solidarity, collective imagination and support.

Please note that those with lived experience of bureaucratic institutions (such as welfare, employment or immigration systems) may find reliving these experiences unpleasant and choose not to attend for their wellbeing. The experience takes 4 hours in total. By signing up to take part, we ask that you commit to this time period in full to ensure a complete experience for everyone involved. This experience is designed for a specific number of participants. If you can no longer attend, please let us know via [email protected] so we can refill your space.

Supported by SICK! Productions, Amarte Fonds, Cultuurfonds, Theater Rotterdam, University of Manchester, and UKRI