PRESENTATION: Francis Alÿs-Children’s Games

Throughout his practice, Francis Alÿs consistently directs his distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility toward anthropological and geopolitical concerns centered around observations of, and engagements with, everyday life. His multifaceted projects including public actions, installations, video, paintings, and drawings¬ have involved traveling the longest possible route between locations in Mexico and the United States; pushing a melting block of ice through city streets; commissioning sign painters to copy his paintings; filming his efforts to enter the center of a tornado; carrying a leaking can of paint along the contested Israel/Palestine border; and equipping hundreds of volunteers to move a colossal sand dune ten centimeters.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo Archive

Francis Alÿs presents “Children’s Games” at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. Since 1999, Alÿs has been producing videos that document the games that children play on the street and in courtyards around the world. Children’s Games is an ongoing archive of urban practices that modernization has been banishing from everyday life as the concept of public space is distorted by the domination of motor vehicles and free time by electronic diversions. The children’s games that Alÿs captures constitute a threatened underground culture that brought together generations and crossed borders, and which are extremely interesting due to their conceptual implications. Their rules, images and references project a variety of concepts on time and the world and suggest an ancient, potent substrate underlying our shared experience, which is another reason why we should be concerned with their imminent disappearance. Many of these videos have been shot in relatively economically underdeveloped regions of the world, where the strength of tradition and community have allowed the shared life of a childhood on the street to survive. While they frequently have a direct value as ethnographic documentation, they also metaphorically record transformations and conflicts in contemporary societies. But both in the mysterious way in which certain games are played practically identically in extremely different societies, as well as in their human value, they also become a signifying mechanism that unites a variety of cultures and ways of life. A large number of these games, if not the entire series “Children’s Games” by Francis Alÿs, give off a utopian aura. They express and document forms of self-regulated sociability, in which children establish a diagram of their social relationships on a competitive basis without recurring to legislation or force. These political implications are among Alÿs’s primary motivations for producing his work. For all these reasons, “Children’s Games” is a project that greatly exceeds the singularity of an artist: it presents itself as an essential archive for humanity’s future.

Photo: Francis Alÿs, Children’s Game #29: La roue (Video still), Lubumbashi, DR Congo, 2021; 8:43 min, In collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Julien Devaux, and Félix Blume, © & Courtesy Francis Alÿs, https://francisalys.com/

Info: Curator: Cuauhtémoc Medina and Virginia Roy, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Insurgentes Sur 3000, Centro Cultural Universitario, Delegación Coyoacán, Ciudad de México, Mexico, Duration: 11/2-17/9/2023, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://muac.unam.mx/

 

 

Francis Alÿs, Children’s Game #10: Papalote, Balkh, Afghanistan, 2011; 4:13 min, In collaboration with Elena Pardo and Félix Blume, © & Courtesy Francis Alÿs, https://francisalys.com/

 

 

Francis Alÿs, Children’s Game #1: Caracoles, Mexico City, Mexico, 1999; 4:43 min, In collaboration with Julien Devaux, © & Courtesy Francis Alÿs, https://francisalys.com/

 

 

Francis Alÿs, Children’s Game #13: Piñata, Oaxaca, Mexico, 2012; 8:17 min, In collaboration with Julien Devaux, Elena Pardo, and Félix Blume, © & Courtesy Francis Alÿs, https://francisalys.com/

 

 

Francis Alÿs, Children’s Game #29: La roue, Lubumbashi, DR Congo, 2021; 8:43 min, In collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Julien Devaux, and Félix Blume, © & Courtesy Francis Alÿs, https://francisalys.com/