State of Play: Francis Alÿs’s Children’s Games

When the urge to play overcomes an adult,
this is not simply a regression to childhood.
To be sure, play is always liberating.

– Walter Benjamin¹

When my ten-year-old son and I visited Francis Alÿs: Ricochets one early afternoon last Summer, we thought we had plenty of time. The show, at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, was centred on the ongoing series of videos of children playing simple games that the Belgium-born/Mexico-based artist started in 1999. A few hours later, we were still there, trying to draw out the last few minutes allowed us by the gallery attendants as they announced the imminent closure for the day. The words of American artist Robert Smithson came to mind: “To spend time in a movie house is to make a ‘hole’ in one’s life.”² We had not exactly been in a “movie house,” of course. But as we exited the darkened spaces of this cinematic installation and found the early evening sun – “Wow! It’s still light!,” my son noted with surprise – it did feel as if our day and its time had been, if not quite “compressed or stopped,” as Smithson put it, then put somewhat out of mind, perceptually on hold.³ To gently get them going again, we sat by the water’s edge of the Barbican’s lakeside terrace, with crisps and a soft drink, and talked about what we had seen (a hole is not necessarily empty) – and how. The “play” thematically and conceptually at the core of Alÿs’s show seemed to have rubbed off on our mode of engagement with it. Children’s Games and the other series on show (the silent, line-drawing animations of Hand Games) seemed, in other words, like works with play at both ends. 

While the expression “child’s play” may be used to describe something extremely easy, play itself maintains a degree of inscrutability – mystery or magic, even – across socio-cultural as well as psychological accounts. If Alÿs’s show prompted reflection on child’s play by virtue of its subject matter, there seemed to be something that worked on us – or, indeed, played with us – aesthetically too. In his influential cultural study of play, Homo Ludens (1938), Dutch historian Johan Huizinga asserted that play is “profoundly aesthetic.”⁴ Perhaps the absorption my son and I experienced on our encounter with Children’s Games (an absorption which, as I learned later, had been far from unusual as a response even on the art-full grounds of the Venice Biennale, in whose Belgian Pavilion the work was shown in 2022) had something to do with the way in which the subject matter of Alÿs’ video series was somehow mirrored or folded into its very aesthetics and exhibition.⁵ 

This potential or perceived alliance of form and content may, in turn, point to the connection between child’s play and what the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott broadly termed “cultural experiences” (of which both Smithson’s account of the “movie house” and our exhibition visit would be instances).⁶ Huizinga had joined play with “culture” tout court in a similar way when he asserted that “culture arises in the form of play.”⁷ So, while the likes of doctor or fire-worker dress-up costumes and kitchen or building-tools toys may suggest that children learn culture in and from play, for Winnicott and Huizinga, the directionality of the connection went the other way. It is child’s play that, chronologically and developmentally, comes first and is primary: “play is older than culture,” Huizinga declares at the very start of Homo Ludens.⁸ While making itself manifest in concrete games, the play at issue here is less a specific activity than what, in his response to (and expansion of) Huizinga’s study – Man, Play and Games (1958) – the French polymath intellectual Roger Caillois at times described as a “spirit of play.”⁹ In the wake of these scholars and observers of play, we may call it a state of play. The simultaneous absorption in play and withdrawal or suspension of “ordinary life” (in Huizinga’s short-hand) characteristic of play make it a disposition or way of being that is both durational and temporary, that takes time (even, perhaps, in the different sense of making a “hole”) but remains “provisional” or “precarious.”¹⁰ Above all, for all these thinkers, play is free and freely chosen, even as it may appear as (or result in) a way of adapting to one’s environment, coping with it. (For Caillois, “[o]ne plays only if and when one wishes to”; for Huizinga, “play is free, [it] is in fact freedom” and “play to order is no longer play”; and for Winnicott, as Adam Phillips explains, “the opposite of play is not work but coercion.”¹¹) Over and above – but also through – its emphasis on “games” on the one hand, and in its aesthetic articulation via moving image and cinematic installation on the other, Francis Alÿs: Ricochets both represented and invited such state of play. 

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Children’s Games #2: Ricochets, Tangier, Morocco, 2007. 4’43”; ratio 4:3. In collaboration with Rafael Ortega and Julien Devaux.

The video that gave the Barbican exhibition its title, Ricochets, is representative of the kind of games collected in Alÿs’ series Children’s Games.¹² Shot in Tangier, Morocco, in 2007, #2: Ricochets shows a child intent at “stone skipping.” Zealously assisted by two younger peers keeping up an abundant stock of flat pebbles for him, the child skilfully throws the stones in the water so as to make them bounce off its surface several times before sinking. None of the games in the series are the kind taken out of a box. Rather, like stone skipping, they are activities that, falling between strictly rule-based games and improvised free play, still reveal, as Walter Benjamin suggested nearly one hundred years ago, how “no one is more chaste in the use of materials than children: a bit of wood, a pinecone, a small stone.”¹³ Chastity may be a synonym for resourcefulness. The playing captured in Children’s Games is about making do with one’s surroundings and what is available therein, from pebbles to discarded tyres, snails to malaria-carrying mosquitos and, even, one’s own body and that of peers (as in leap-frogging, dancing, chasing). While occasionally they may have a distinctively local identity, most games appear to be culturally and historically specific modulations of widely (if not “universally”) practiced staples, such as the Covid-era update of “tag” developed by children in Mexico during the pandemic (#25: Contagio, Malinalco, 2021), or the checkpoint and password game played not far from the actual frontline in the Ukrainian-Russian war (#39: Parol, Kharkiv, Ukraine, 2023). 

Currently counting at nearly fifty, the videos of Children’s Games constitute an open archive of young play, slowly and unsystematically assembled over time. While spanning the globe – from Venezuela to Switzerland, Hong Kong to Cuba, Taiwan to Morocco, and including countries recently or currently affected by conflict or war, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine – the videos do not exhaustively cover it. Rather than purposefully travelling around the world to make them, Alÿs only shoots them on the sidelines of other commission or exhibition invitations (itself, to some extent, a way of being “chaste” not unconnected from the spirit of the games filmed).¹⁴ Varying in length between approximately three and fifteen minutes, and shot with a variety of means, from film and digital cameras to smartphones, they are generally made by a small crew of two or three (Julien Devaux, Félix Blume, and Rafael Ortega feature among the stable collaborators). 

Children’s Games #31: Slakken, Pajottenland, Belgium, 2021. 5’01”; ratio 16:9. In collaboration with Julien Devaux and Félix Blume.

The moving image offers a sense of the durational unfolding of play and the alternation, or co-existence, of movement and stasis within it – as with a young boy’s patient, slow pushing uphill of a truck tyre in #29: La Roue (Lubumbashi, DRC, 2021), followed by the tyre’s subsequent (hair-raising) hurtling downhill, the boy cocooned very still inside it. Indeed, as well as capturing bursts of kinetic exhilaration, Children’s Games makes manifest the absorbed stillness of preparation or onlooking; framing and editing draw attention to the efforts of concentration across the children’s whole body – legs, feet, hands, mouths – not just their gazes. From the children running after the boy in the tyre (or the tyre with the boy) in La Roue, to the cheering groups of #16: Hopscotch (Sharya Refugee Camp, Iraq, 2016) and the snail’s race of #31: Slakken (Pajottenland, Belgium, 2021), collective spectating or patient waiting for one’s turn emerge as a conspicuous part of playing, not as external to it. I found myself thinking of Helen Levitt’s 1948 short film In the Street which, complementing her series of photographs of Harlem children’s chalk drawings – overtly paid homage to by Alÿs in #47: Chalk (London, UK, 2024) – could rely on the moving image to capture not only play’s temporal unfolding and dynamic exuberance, but also its moments of stasis or suspension (and the “micro-movements” of attention and concentration within them). 

The featured children are themselves key collaborators in the project, playing and performing at once. While seemingly oblivious to the camera filming them, the children at the same time appear consciously proud to demonstrate – have recorded and indeed, even, “archived” – their ingenuity and skills. “[P]lay … is nearly always spectacular or ostentatious,” Caillois suggested, and these videos are a show, and a show off.¹⁵ (As Alÿs and Ortega explain, their production is a collaborative effort, and the play activity being filmed is generally rehearsed over about five takes.¹⁶) 

Like many others of Alÿs’s videos documenting the individual or collective actions characteristic of his artistic practice, the whole – ongoing – series is free to view and download under a commons’ agreement on the artist’s website. But, as in the case of my recent encounter with it, Children’s Games is also exhibited as a multi-screen installation in gallery spaces.¹⁷ From the balcony on the second floor of the Barbican gallery, where the videos’ soundtracks below blended into a cacophony in which, occasionally, fragments of laughter, a word or a shrill of joy could be distinguished, looking down at the seemingly irregular arrangement of screens and their ever-moving images was indeed evocative of a playground. From this perspective, larger-than-life children across different times and places were drawn, by the “montage” performed by the installation itself, into a seemingly shared, synchronous play – one, even, whose kaleidoscopic arrangement of local, transcultural and globalized elements may be synoptically glimpsed. As well as by these projected “conversations” between the screens, our attention was also absorbed by the circular route of display cabinets lining the balcony’s perimeter, which we followed slowly, bending down slightly to take in the long history of play and children games – tracing activities such as stick and wheel to the Middle Ages and beyond – told by the prints, book illustrations and quotes arranged behind glass. One such quote, by the Italian children writer Gianni Rodari, read: “Reality can be entered through the main door, or it can be slipped into through a window, which is much more fun.”¹⁸ 

Yes, the “hole” my son and I had made in our lives had felt less like an exit from reality than an alternative entry into it or an entry into alternative realities. Moving slowly from screen to screen, we had become engrossed by a fiercely unflinching conkers challenge on the grounds of an inner-London council estate very familiar to us ( #46: Conkers, 2024) and, a meter or so away, the unfamiliar game of a group of children, hands cupped around their mouths, eyes and necks raised towards the sky, emitting an uninterrupted, monotone, almost ghost-like (‘uuuuhhhhh’) chant in Tobacongo (#30: Imbu, DRC, 2021), revealed, in the course of the video, as a way of attracting mosquitos – some of which would find their death in a hand clap.¹⁹ We had both been deeply absorbed by – sucked into? – the times and spaces that opened up inside the exhibition, not only on its multiple screens, but also, indeed, between and off them.

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In Playing and Reality, Winnicott often returns to the idea of a “direct development” between child’s play (including, indeed, that of very young children) and what he broadly terms “cultural experiences.” The latter “are in direct continuity with play, the play of those who have not yet heard of games.”²⁰ While earlier psychological studies (by Jean Piaget or Lev Vygotsky) had underlined the importance of play for cognitive and social development into adulthood, Winnicott’s interest in exploring the nexus between child’s play and (adult) culture has a different emphasis. More idiosyncratic studies, such as Huizinga’s and Caillois’ aforementioned classic books, may, even if he himself does not mention them, bear greater affinity with the flavour of Winnicott’s intention. In the forward to Homo Ludens, Huizinga explains that, since his book’s objective is not “to define the place of play among all the other manifestations of culture, but rather to ascertain how far culture itself bears the character of play,” the most accurate subtitle for the book would be “a study of the play element of culture,” rather than the “in culture” eventually settled for with the publisher.²¹  Winnicott’s sense of the profound interconnectedness between play and cultural experience resonates with Huizinga’s understanding of the link between the two and his prepositional preference for “of” rather than “in” to express it: (child) play is not simply within (adult) culture as a part or derivative; rather, it is – ontologically, even – related and equal to it. Winnicott would put it in a much more matter-of-fact and concrete way: “What holds for play also holds for [Johan Sebastian Bach’s] St. Matthew Passion at which I am almost certain to find colleagues when I go to the Festival Hall in a few week’s time.”²² What, in the informal phrasing above, “holds for” both play and cultural experience is affirmed, in Winnicott’s psychoanalytic vocabulary, by bringing them under the umbrella of “transitional phenomena,” derived from his initial notion of the “transitional object” (a favourite teddy bear, a blanket) which helps the child negotiate – and separate – fantasy and reality, inner and outer world, me and not-me.²³ Such “transitional” function of play for the child continues, in adulthood, with cultural experience, in which the grown-up may indeed be able to find a “third area” or “potential space” between psychic interiority (imagination, fantasy) and the outside world.²⁴ 

These Winnicottian ideas on a nexus between playing and cultural experience, as a carrying over of the transitional phenomena of childhood into adulthood, have received increasing attention in the study of the arts and aesthetics in the last couple of decades. By also drawing on the work of Winnicott’s fellow analyst (and one-time analysand) Marion Milner and her concepts of framing, frame and “framed gap,” it is mostly the spatial flavour of Winnicott’s metaphors that is generatively put to use.²⁵ In the context of moving-image studies, Annette Kuhn, for instance, has paid attention both to the space within the film frame and the screen and, thinking of the gallery film and its institutional and architectural context, without.²⁶ 

But my visit to Alÿs’s exhibition also forcefully brought into relief the temporal inflections of the affinity between play and cultural experience posited by Winnicott. In “The Location of Cultural Experience”, Winnicott explains, in his typically seemingly casual style, that he used the expression “without being certain” that he could “define the word ‘culture.’ The accent indeed is on experience.”²⁷ There is an alignment (slightly counterintuitive perhaps) between this emphasis on “experience” and Winnicott’s stated preference for the verbal noun “playing,” to indicate that play is an action, a “doing things,” as he puts it, that “takes time.”²⁸ As well as taking place – in a “potential space” which, while being neither “inside” nor “outside” individuals, relies on both their inner and outer realities – playing takes time. While the expression “doing things” may seem casual, there is a precision in using “doing” and not “making”: similarly to the “creativity” which always accompanies it, playing does not mean, or need to result in, the “creation” of things but is, rather, a quality that “belongs to being alive.”²⁹ Not unlike what the individual videos of Children’s Games do in audio-visual form, Winnicott described specific and concrete play activities (the “spatula” and “squiggle” games he played with his child patients are well known).³⁰ But – again, I believe, like Children’s Games does at another level, taken as an aggregate work and, at the Barbican, via the format and aesthetics of its overall installation and exhibition – Winnicott also sought to present and think about play as a more general, underlying, disposition or state that can be freely – spontaneously – entered and entertained. For this more conceptual understanding of playing, “[w]hat matters,” Winnicott writes, is not “the content” of play, but “the near-withdrawal state, akin to the concentration of older children and adults. The playing child inhabits an area that cannot be easily left, nor can it easily admit intrusions.”³¹ It is in this fundamental sense that playing and cultural experience align: as absorbed and withdrawn states of being – by definition temporal and temporary, even if “not easily left.” Or perhaps the lingering of the state of absorption by (and withdrawal into) play or cultural experience is precisely an indication of its durational and temporary nature – as the awareness of a post-movie house “hole in one’s life” might also suggest.

Reviews and critical commentaries on Children’s Games tend to focus on its subject matter: the seeming universality and/or local particularity of the showcased games, as well as children’s absorbed engagement in play. While there might be an acknowledgement of the difference between encountering the work on the artist’s website or in a gallery, little attention, overall, is paid to its form, from the elected mode of capture to the modalities of its circulation and exhibition.³² Yet, subject matter, form – or, indeed, formats (the moving image, the free online archive and the cinematic installation) resonate powerfully in this work and contribute to make it not only an archive of games, but also a reflection about play and, especially in its immersive cinematic form, a potential “cultural experience” in the Winnicottian sense – but of play itself: a cultural experience in reflexive mode. 

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While still “absorbed” by the exhibition on the bus home, we left it with a sense of both unease and uplift. The geo-political realities of war, conflict, violence, poverty, and disease – and their impact on children – seep into many of the videos of Children’s Games, even if not overtly portrayed. And, despite one of the vitrines in the upstairs gallery displaying a quote from Caillois’s Man, Play and Games reassuring us that “[e]mpires and institutions may disappear, but games […] possess the permanence of the insignificant,” a sense of precarity and fragility permeated the show.³³ This had not so much to do with the individual games themselves, recorded and archived by the joint efforts of the children, Alÿs and his crew but, as Caillois called it, the very “spirit” of play incarnated and articulated via them. Paradoxically, it was this “spirit” (children out together in public spaces, “in the street,” as Levitt’s film put it) that seemed fragile. But perhaps this is not unlike the precariousness of the “state” of play itself.

Endnotes