Belgian-born Francis Alÿs arrived in Mexico City in 1986 as a trained architect to participate in an NGO earthquake-relief project. He remained there, turning his attention to visual art and eventually gaining international recognition. His work has been presented at prominent institutions including Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Copenhagen Contemporary; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, as well as at the Gwangju Biennale and Venice Biennale.
Alÿs is known for videos, paintings, drawings, installations, and public actions that often appear whimsical or outlandish while calling attention to geopolitical and anthropological concerns. In The Green Line (2004), Alÿs carried a leaking can of green paint for 15 miles along the armistice border between Israel and Jordan, established in 1948. The 2002 film When Faith Moves Mountains documents his efforts to move an enormous sand dune in Lima, Peru, by just a few inches with the help of a team of volunteers. Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) (1997) follows Alÿs as he pushes a melting block of ice through the streets of Mexico City for nine hours.
Since 1999, alongside other commissions and exhibition invitations, Alÿs has been producing Children’s Games, an ongoing series of videos featuring children at play in streets and yards around the world. The project now comprises fifty videos filmed in more than twenty countries. “When I first started documenting children’s games, it was more a way of making contact with any location where I was invited…. I realized it was a very rapid way of assimilating to the local codes, the cultural codes, it’s been very convenient as the entry point to developing projects. Over the years, I’ve gotten more engaged in the actual ‘nature of the games,’ if you want, and am trying to build a compilation of games,” explains Alÿs.
Each video lasts for the duration of a single game—usually three to eight minutes—and almost all were filmed in the Global South. Yet the compilation reveals the universality, or transcultural nature, of many of the games. For example, children play “rock, paper, scissors” in Mexico, marbles in Jordan, jacks or “knucklebones” in Nepal, and hopscotch in a Sharya refugee camp in Iraq. While some games are improvised and others have established rules, the children primarily use objects they have at hand or can scavenge in the streets, demonstrating creativity and resourcefulness in environments that may be underdeveloped or impoverished.
One such place is Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where Children’s Game #15: Espejos (2013) takes place. In just under five minutes, a group of boys run into a set of abandoned, dilapidated houses and find shards of broken mirrors (espejos). They use the pieces to aim reflected sunlight at one another; when light strikes a player, he collapses and dies. The boys run through the houses, hiding behind walls and ducking under windows until only one player remains.
Although the children are aware of Alÿs’s camera as it follows them, capturing the action at close range, the artist never actively participates in the games. “You cannot really direct children.… You must adapt and improvise, to quickly grasp the mechanics of the scene and react. The kids take the lead and you adapt, rather than you directing them,” says Alÿs. He has also observed that the project has begun to take on an “ethnological dimension.” The films illustrate how children reinvent the world while revealing social tensions, colonial inequalities, and geopolitical power structures.
Many games echo the rituals and customs of their societies, reflecting the worlds the children inhabit. “Kids assimilate the adult reality around them into playing. I think games are a way for the children to assimilate the adult world and adult society, as their way of mimicking, mocking, but also integrating the social contract,” Alÿs explains. Despite these serious undertones, the games remain playful. Children’s Games conveys the children’s joy and enthusiasm while highlighting the deep bonds that develop among them.
As public play becomes rarer amid the rise of social media and video games, increased vehicular traffic, and parental anxiety about outdoor spaces, Alÿs has recognized the importance of documenting these childhood activities. “I’m very much interested in games that take advantage of the immediate surroundings. We are at a moment of transition, and…it is important to record these [games] while they still spontaneously appear.”
—Kanitra Fletcher