Play is an integral part of our lived experience. In this digital age, it has evolved to include not just real-world activities but also virtual-reality fun and exploration. The exhibition Francis Alÿs: Ricochets (27 June – 1 September 2024) provided a timely opportunity to reflect on what real-life play means to children and how these experiences can be documented.
Born in Belgium in 1959, Francis Alÿs is a Mexico-based visual artist who has centered his work on children’s play since 1999. By observing and filming the everyday play of children around the world, his films reveal how children respond to and transform their reality in highly resilient and creative ways. The exhibition spanned two distinct levels within the Barbican Art Gallery. Entering, I immediately felt transported to a playground full of children having fun. The overlapping sounds of children came from the large and small screens arranged in clusters, allowing visitors to move around and watch two or three games within a few steps. In contrast with the large screens, a series of postcard-sized paintings by Alÿs were displayed along the walls, illustrating how he observes, approaches, and records the gaming scenes in a different art form before capturing them on camera.
Almost all the games displayed take place outdoors. Barefoot spinning in the dirt, communicating tonally with malaria-spreading mosquitoes, leapfrogging, snowball fighting—I marveled at the depth of interaction between children and their environment during these activities. The space for play is the local area, so we find them playing under big trees, by the river, amidst flying dust, on snowy fields. Almost all the props for their games are made from materials at hand: flattened plastic bottle caps, chestnuts threaded to strings, candy wrappers, stones, wooden boards and bicycle tires… These films show us how children living in different circumstances use their creativity to the fullest and have fun with resources around them. Their play is an all-encompassing and non-judgmental experience of their surroundings. The intimate interaction with the natural and social environment provides children with a solid existential experience that is difficult for virtual-reality games to replicate.
Most of the short films on display are not subtitled, which meant we had to appreciate the ingenuity of the games entirely through observation. Some games required several viewings, or reference to the written exhibition guides, to understand how they worked. This created a fantastic power-reversal moment between the adult viewers and the child players. Children are the game masters because they can actively participate in the invention and adaptation of games depending on how the play progresses and how many people are involved. To understand how the game is played, why they enjoy it, and even to participate in it, we need to learn from them by observing at a specific gaming site. This scenario rarely happens in video gaming, as the designers of the games are almost always adults, and most players will by default obey the pre-programmed rules. Additionally, for widespread distribution, video games often smooth out cultural or societal differences. This is not the case in real-life games, as everything in children’s daily experience can serve as an inspiration. The elements of conflict and pandemics in some games reflect how swiftly children perceive and respond to social realities in their play.
The upper gallery was darker and quieter, without much reflection and sound from the downstairs screens. It featured playrooms for hand-shadow games and dark chambers displaying animations. Around the banister, source material for children’s games were categorized by theme. These manuscripts, paintings, and magazine illustrations highlighted the long history of children’s games and their wide dissemination across cultures. In all, the upper exhibition worked to remind us how games permeate our lives, existing at the intersection of the individual and the collective, the historical and the contemporary, the culturally specific and the universal.
Documenting games is undoubtedly an endeavor of great significance in capturing the essence of human experience. Ricochets made it clear that real-life outdoor play offers children rich interactions with nature, people, and full engagement of their bodies, agency and imagination. Nonetheless, as I stood in a modern gallery filled with screen transporting me to the expansive universe of children’s games, I wondered if Alÿs’s work will extend to encompass children’s experiences with other forms of play, such as video games. Just as the medium for recording and displaying games has transitioned from slates, canvases and prints to video cameras and screens, gaming is evolving and shaping the meaning of play for new generations. When diverse forms of play are juxtaposed, what different stories, questions and patterns of childhood will emerge?
Huiyun Mo is a PhD student at the Department of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London. She is interested in exploring imaginings of future childhoods across cultures. Her comparative project examines the portrayal of children and childhood in cloning-themed speculative fiction, films and TV series, focusing on human cloning as an assisted reproductive technology and its ethical implications for children and society.
