MonApoly, A Human Trade Game, 2004

Tadej Pogačar is the artist, curator, and founder of a virtual critical platform, The P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of Contemporary Art (1990). From this platform, he developed a new theory and method for creating an alternative culture and social activities, which he called new parasitism. Pogačar’s projects are based on the use of various media and focus on urban interventions and collaborations with social minorities. Pogačar investigates different systems and produces transregional levels of reference.

The game MonApoly is a new and critical version of the popular board game Monopoly and is a result of Pogačar’s long-standing engagement with the situation of sex workers worldwide. The players receive information about global sex working, important places, committed organizations, gangs that control the trade, and so forth. During the course of the game, it is possible to finance the construction of a safe house, support the activities of groups who fight for the rights of the sex workers, or have a sex slave from the Republic of Moldova freed.

MonApoly enables a new cartography of human trafficking. Instead of amassing capital like in Monopoly, the artist explains to the players the geopolitics of sex working in the era of late capitalism and globalization. Tadej Pogačar analyses the parallel markets that are created as a reaction to existing markets and socio-political and social developments, which are characterized by illegality, ensuring survival, fear, and expulsion. (AE)