An immersive walkthrough experience exploring Shakespeare's Othello through Cyprus's intertwined artistic and epidemiological history.
Shameru Collective
Othello's Fever is an immersive walkthrough experience built in a game engine, where participants wander through a dreamlike environment shaped by Shakespeare's Othello and the layered histories of Cyprus—an homage to the island's interwoven artistic and epidemiological renaissance. Set against Shakespearean dramaturgy and British colonial medical campaigns, the work entwines the theatrical and the biological: the stage becomes a landscape of madness and fever, resilience and immunity, tragedy and infection—an entanglement of Cyprus's cultural and health heritage. The malaria-stricken body of Othello—shaken by headaches, seizures, and nausea—collides with Desdemona's inherited resilience, their fates entwined in the genetic and ecological currents of the Mediterranean, their encounter echoing the ancient dance of sickness and survival that haunts the region. Moving through the space, the audience inhabits the blurred border between theatre and clinic, myth and memory, where the stage is both a site of cultural renaissance and a terrain haunted by disease.
Unlike conventional visualizations of animal-transmitted diseases that rely on biomedical models, Othello's Fever proposes an alternative: a poetic ecology. The work reimagines disease not as data points or pathogens, but as lived history, cultural heritage, and embodied memory. Wandering through this blurred stage-clinic, visitors encounter malaria not as a scientific abstraction but as an imaginative embodiment and a virtual echo refracted through Shakespearean tragedy, Mediterranean genetics, and the spectral archives of Cyprus.