Children's Game #1 Caracoles. Mexico City, Mexique, 1999
4 min 33 sec, Fichier numérique (DVC), NTSC, 4/3, couleur, son
Children’s Games, a series of short videos initiated by Francis Alÿs in 1999, explores the world of childhood play in the spirit of a visual inventory. His inquiry is deeply rooted in the use of public space. Cities and villages, peaceful settings as well as zones of conflict or tension, such as a Yezidi refugee camp in Iraq in 2016, become sites for a topographic imagination in which these playful activities unfold. Within the shared rules of each game resonates a symbolic order—and the possibility of its reinvention. In Mexico, Venezuela, Belgium, France, Jordan, Afghanistan, Morocco, Iraq, and Nepal, children’s games merge with ritual and the reworking of lived experience, drawing the artist and his camera into a form of participation. The choice of point of view and the accompaniment of movement condense the fleeting space-time of play into something akin to a sketch or a freehand diagram drawn from life.
Francis Alÿs first studied architecture—he trained at IUAV in Venice—before beginning his artistic practice in Mexico City. Since the 1990s, he has developed a conceptual body of work shaped by displacement, wandering, and encounter.
Marcella Lista
Translated by Laurie Hurwitz