why are you running?

ALT SIBIU 1989 is an installation showing a first-person video game set in an alternative, abstract version of the city of Sibiu, Romania. The video game foregrounds a fictitious protest situation, remixing and taking inspiration from direct and indirect accounts of people who lived through the Romanian Revolution and participated in the 1989 protest uprisings in Timișoara, Bucharest and Sibiu, against the communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu.
The game allows the player/spectator to wander within a maze of surfaces that follows the layout of the city of Sibiu, that gradually begins to become increasingly crowded with civilians, protesters, revolutionaries, military and law enforcement officers. In the tradition of the survival sub-genre that developed after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the player's objective is to survive. Even though the game is not an accurate historical summary of the Romanian Revolution, the player is accompanied during the gameplay experience by testimonies and accounts of the time.