3 January 2024

Francis Alÿs’ Children’s Games

My mother comes to visit me for a few days in Brussels. I show her around my city and take her to see Francis Alÿs’s exhibition Children’s Games at WIELS. As we enter the space, we’re engulfed by children’s voices, as if entering a playground. Hanging in the dark are screens that you can walk between to see the different videos. Each screen shows a game played by children somewhere in the world. The sounds of all these videos tumble over each other. I feel overwhelmed, because it’s been quite a while since I threw myself without reservation into the children’s frenzy. There’s something unsettling about the chaos of children playing; there’s a lot of yelling, screaming, and shouting, and it always takes a bit before you can determine if it’s innocent enthusiasm or if intervention is required. The energy of a playground oscillates between passionate zeal and rowdy excitement, where deep concentration silently creeps in between. When we let the commotion wash over us and watch a screen, we see that children take their play very seriously.

A number of Danish children hold hands and make a long chain, then move between each other. When they’re hopelessly tangled together, they call out for their “mother,” a child with the task of untangling the jumble of children. The way Alÿs filmed all these children is simple, unadorned, but with an effectiveness that impresses. We see the simplicity of children’s play with the attention it deserves.

As I look around, I become aware that my own mother has also often watched me play. Her presence used to be a condition for getting into a game. She always kept half an eye on me. I demanded her attention until I got older and emancipated myself from her safe gaze. We only wanted to play outside and every adult became a killjoy. We’d declared ourselves independent of our parents – even if only as a game. This is why it’s exceptional that Alÿs was allowed to get so close and even film the children. Now that we have the privilege of watching children play, I realize how my desire to play without my mother’s presence meant a break for her, the creation of a definitive distance. But now from the side of adulthood we watch children together who are on the other side for both of us. Unnoticed, I’d moved from a separated playing field to an adult life even more distant from my mother, but in which we can truly meet again, like when together we watch children playing.

After we’ve visited all the screens one by one, the bustle of all the children’s voices sounds much more nuanced; it’s no longer the sound of just any playground but of a play space that brings together children from all over the world. We hear the buzzing of mosquito lamps, the rain falling on the backs of painted snails, as well as the imitation of an air-raid siren as it sounds in Ukrainian cities. Play is also sometimes a way of keeping harsh reality at bay.

Children’s Games is an ethnographic documentation of children’s cultures. Each game has its own tradition, takes place within a political system and in an ecosystem. The children make very inventive use of natural elements, avoiding prohibitions, rewriting rules, and responding to their own culture, which always shines through in their play. Children’s play reveals something fundamental about the world they live in.

As we walk back to my apartment, I see wobbly tiles, loose wires, and broken windows in a new way. Not as a defect but as an invitation: a child in particular knows how to play on the frayed edges of urban space. I remember how even in a Dutch village we came up with ideas. We wrapped a brick in giftwrap, put the package on the sidewalk, and watched from the attic window how adults biking by would quickly pop it in their bike bag or eagerly rip it open and then look around ashamed. Childhood pranks are often a form of anthropological investigation. But on the streets of Brussels, we don’t see a single child. Where do children play in my city? Surrounded by the chaotic city traffic, my mother tells how she played in the streets of the village where I also grew up.  We stay safe on the sidewalk. We remain villagers.