Spielplatz Endzeit: Digital rites in alpine borderlands
The Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation aims at initiating conversations on cultural exchange and offers grants for mobility beyond the current forms of support. Supported by Projekt Atol, Toma Pilein, reflects on his experience with the “Spielplatz Endzeit” project.
Spielplatz Endzeit (End-time playground) is a transnational, multi-day performance series exploring themes of resilience, communication, and play in an imagined post‑apocalyptic world. In it, a group of travelers wanderers through a world without any electrical infrastructure, using only the electric power they generate by hand. Their world still yearns for rituals of the past: playing multiplayer online games, holding video conferences, and sharing streams of new memes. The group is a traveling theatre, emulating the internet and bringing the digital joys of the past to people they meet along the way.
My name is Toma Pilein, and I am the writer and initiator of this play. Me and my co-organizers Codi Körner and Justine Maier Ortega build the framework to make it happen once and again. In 2025, we decided to put Spielplatz Endzeit on a new stage: the Alps on the border between Italy and Austria.
The beginnings
On our first journey in 2024, we were six people walking from Lipno in Czechia to Linz in Austria. On our five-day long trip, we crossed old monuments of electric power generation: hydroelectric plants, windmills, and disused power stations. We slept in abandoned taverns, old hay trailers, log cabins, and drained pools. We brought our hyperlocal internet to the people we met by setting up wireless local area networks. We played networked multiplayer Tetris, held outdoor video conferences, and shared digital drawings. Our hand-crank generator let us document our journey, as it provided power for our digital camera. The things we carried were not high-tech hiking gear but were put together from found and gifted goods. Our laptops were outdated second-hand devices, running open-source software adapted to our needs. Walking through the countryside, our peculiar appearance and behaviour were met with curiosity, irritation, and joy. The children we met understood our mission straight away and helped us generate electric power for our devices. Some grown men were irritated by our straight-faced role-play, termed us provocative in our doomsday journey, and did not see the bright side of our mission. Most passersby just turned their heads, reluctant to ask who we are and where we are going. Most of the time, we were among ourselves. Walking, finding out more about our imagined past, and trying to reach our shelters before sunset.
At its core, the play seeks to fuse and defuse three areas of interest often correlated with militaristic and patriarchal ideas: survivalism, amateur radio, and gaming. It speculatively explores a pacifist and feminist version of those fields, focusing on their core ideas: resilience, communication, and play. The narrative framework of Spielplatz Endzeit can be explored in more detail in the project’s Memorandum of Understanding. What I want to elaborate on here are the intricacies of making it happen, our 2025 exploration trip, and how the organisational efforts themselves pointed to something also integral to the project’s theme: the importance of community and communication when preparing for an uncertain future.
A broken bone and other obstacles
In 2025, we wanted to climb the Alps with Spielplatz Endzeit, crossing the border of Italy and Austria at the Piftscherjoch, following the Zamser Grund valley. We chose the place for the wild nature of the mountain ranges, both beautiful and perilous, in which human settlements are scarce. As last year, we intend to cross a state border where no car could pass. Considering our quest to bemoan the loss of power plants, the area also contains Austria’s most powerful group of hydroelectric plants, the Kraftwerksgruppe Zemm-Ziller. Along the way, we would come across decaying bunkers and a molybdenum mine, reminding us of a violent past. Our last stop would be the Stillup reservoir of the powerplant, where our narrative promises us to find a server, the last server that is still up. While the area is sparsely populated, we would still meet people who hike there. I am currently living nearby in Bozen, which allows us to visit the place more easily for preparing the journey. At the same time, the area provides many more challenges than our previous route: steep terrain, few options for night stops, and potentially too much tourism.
Additionally, we do not have a long-standing personal relationship with that area, making it difficult to find places for the night. Yet we still felt up for the challenge, having an all too promising image in our heads. What we knew for sure was that we couldn’t simply repeat what we did on our first trip. We needed to explore the area first, while not being fully immersed in our imagined world, to keep the trip save. We decided to use the summer of 2025 to find out more about the area. The goal of our trip was to decide if the route was feasible for a larger group and to find potential night stops. All this while still exploring the story of Spielplatz Endzeit, yet on a smaller scale.
In preparing Spielplatz Endzeit, one of the most challenging aspects is finding shelters for the night. We are looking for very specific places. They should provide no electricity and be a kind of makeshift housing that is not commonly used as shelter. Besides protecting us from the elements, they have another crucial role. They provide a background in front of which we can immerse ourselves in our anachronistic fiction. What was crucial for finding and opening suitable spaces for our first trip in 2024 was that I had grown up in the area we crossed. I could connect with people I knew from childhood, looking for options. I could ask family and friends to help me out. I was met with some credit of trust, despite carrying forward unusual requests. Still, the process was arduous. The strangers I approached were very hesitant in opening up their spaces for a group of performers. Understandably so, as I had nothing to offer but our story and was no traveller in dire need of a shelter. Looking back on our trip to the Alps in 2025, I underestimated how important the personal connection to the place is when one wants to realize an undertaking like this.
Originally, I planned to go on the survey trip together with Codi, Justine, and Uwe. Uwe had to cancel, as he was starting a new job and was moving to a new place during this time. Shortly before we wanted to start our journey, Codi broke their collarbone on a mountain bike trip, while Justine also had to cancel. I knew that doing the trip by myself would defeat its purpose. I travelled to the Pfitscherjoch before and wanted another firsthand opinion on the route. Asking around, I could find two other people who would join me spontaneously. Just a few days before the start, one of the two cancelled. They said they underestimated the scale of this endeavour, feeling unprepared. In the end, we were two: Me and Hess Jeon, an artist and designer from South Korea living in Linz. Hess already supported us during our trip last year, providing food on the final day of our arrival in Linz. As an avid and experienced hiker, he would make the perfect travel companion.
Crossing the Alps
We started our journey in Linz on the 7th of August 2025. It took us a full day of travel to get to Bozen due to construction work on the train tracks towards Italy. In Bozen, we stayed for the night in my apartment. The following day, we travelled via train and bus to the starting location of our hike, Pfitsch. We started walking at nine o’clock. The weather was sunny and warm—the ideal conditions. Rain would prevent us from using any of our DIY electronics. Hess and I talked about our shared interest hiking and preparedness and what motivated us to be part of Spielplatz Endzeit. Hess told me about his past as a motorcycle mechanic in Korea, an embalmer in Ireland, and his current research on plastic culture. The vast mountain panorama felt serene. It seemed that a post-apocalyptic world can be a peaceful world. We walked past an abandoned bunker from the First World War and considered it as a place for the night, with the caveat that it sat right next to a popular hiking route. We would prefer a place that felt safe, not where curious people would visit our residence at any time.
Near the highest point of our hike, on the Pfitscherjoch, we met a group of friends who walk up there every year. When Hess and I were on our way down, we heard someone shout “He! Musiker!”. We didn’t give it any attention. Again we heard: “He Musiker!”. I figured this was directed at me, as I was carrying a post horn on my backpack. The post horn was intended as a physical symbol for the transmission of information, but also to announce a successfully established network connection. It turned out to also serve the purpose of engaging other hikers. The group of friends was noticing it and understandably considered me a musician. I played a few off-key notes for them. They insisted that we drink beer and Schnaps with them. Much later, the group turned out to be very helpful in providing information on the area, as we met them again in the valley.
After we crossed the Pfitscherjoch, we descended to the Schlegeis reservoir, an artificial lake that is part of the hydroelectric plant in the Zillertal. We find that the plant generates approximately 10 million times more energy than we do with our hand-crank generator. Paying tribute to those inconceivable amounts of watts, we went down to the base of the dam and looked up 131 meters of reinforced concrete. We blew the postal horn and waited for it to answer with its echo.
We decided to stay at Dominikushütte, an alpine inn directly at the reservoir. There we met our acquaintances from the Pfitscherjoch again. We asked them if they knew who owned the abandoned guesthouse we passed on our way here, as it seemed like the ideal night shelter for our journey. They knew. It was owned by the innkeeper of this very place. They seemed to know him well, and I hoped for a benevolent introduction. He was very busy serving his guests and it seemed not the right day for such a request. We asked him anyway and he was all but enthusiastic about our plans. He said that we would be bothered by the rats. He ended the conversation saying that only he and his family are allowed to enter this place. I assume convincing an innkeeper to provide an unused space as accommodation is even harder than convincing any other owner of unused property. By profession, they are concerned with providing a flawless room and the most comfortable stay, while we look for the opposite.
Walking in the forest, we found an enormous parasol mushroom. Not being fully sure if it was the mushroom we thought it was, we looked around for adept mushroom pickers. After a while, we met a crowd of climbers gathered around a huge freestanding granite rock. One of the climbers consulted the internet for classifying our mushroom. This brought up a question we already asked ourselves, namely, how to relate to something that does not exist in our imagined world. On our journey last year, we established the custom to call people whose behaviour does not follow the logic of our play “ghosts”, similarly calling cars “ghost drivers”. We explained their appearance as a reflection of the past we can naturally interact with. We tried to experience a non-linear model of time, where events of different times overlap. This allowed us not to lose ourselves in incoherent contradictions interacting with the world around us. Our interaction was limited to the people of the past, and did not extend to their infrastructure. Those people came from a place with abundant, ubiquitous, and seemingly infinite streams of world-traveling data bundles driven by enormous generators producing gigawatts of power. We could only dream of electricity without getting out of breath, producing a handful of watts. It is always a delicate balance confronting people we meet with the logic of our story. We want them to be able to join in, without needing to explain all our world to them. At the same time, we do not want them to think we are mocking them by talking of a reality that does not exist. In this regard, the encounters with kids felt the most natural. They were used to making up worlds in their head and truthfully living in them. In the end, our approach to any encounter was very individual, always carefully exploring to what extent we should open up our world to them.
On the 9th of August, after traveling all along the narrow valley following the river to the reservoir, we left the world of Spielplatz Endzeit and entered a bus. On our ride back and with heavy hearts, we decided that we are not ready yet to bring the play into the Alps. What we gained were important insights into what this area is offering and which challenges it presents. We will come back for sure, but the time has not yet come. Next year, we will remain in flatter terrain, but we will stay in contact with the people from the Alps.
More on Rewilding Cultures
Toma Pilein was mentored by Projekt Atol for the mobility conversation.