Children’s Game #36: Kujunkuluka
Children spin in circles until only one remains standing—the last to fall wins.
- The game invites attention to the body: balance, dizziness, and the feel of the ground underfoot.
- There’s a sense of synchronization among players, and shadow movements add a visual rhythm.
- Imagination and colours through cloting
Children’s Game #25: Contagio
A variation of tag where children "infect" each other, mimicking the spread of a virus.
- Play becomes a way to process the anxiety and disruption of COVID-19.
- Resonates with historical games like “Ring a Ring o’ Roses”, rooted in the memory of the plague. A game which play and sing to this day.
- Suggests how games act as repositories of collective memory and cultural trauma.
Children’s Game #12: Musical Chairs
Musical Chairs
- Elements of setting up the stage and the game unsetting the stage
- A child loses their shoe but chooses to continue the game highlighting the high stakes of the game
- Highlights dynamics of inclusion and exclusion: being “out” doesn’t mean being removed from the social moment.
- Children often move out of sync, adding tension and spontaneity.
- Imagining the game without chairs emphasizes the choreography and instability of the setup.
The game gives children a stage to perform, compete, and express agitation.
Children’s Game #29: La roue
Children in Lubumbashi play a dangerous game, pushing and riding a massive tire down the slag heap of the Étoile du Congo cobalt mine, a landscape shaped by extraction.
- Play vs extraction: people risk their lives scavenging lithium under dangerous conditions to supply the global battery industry.
- Play vs labour: The contrast between play and labor highlights the tension of children finding joy and imagination in a space defined by exploitation and extraction
- The children’s chant, “pushing, pushing,” reflects their awareness of their environment and becomes a symbol of resilience and adaptation
- Disparity in childhood safety in global south vs places benefiting from these extraction
- Children constructing their own roller coaster
- Repeated climbs and descents: ritualistic engagement with a mined and damaged landscape.
- Their play imagines an alternative to the reality around them, offering agency
- Also referenced: military rule in Nigeria and the destruction of Ogoni land, with poet Ben Oakley honoring those who resisted mining-related devastation through the power of words and poetry.
Quote from The Nature Of Game
“In the Children’s Games, La roue is one of the finest examples of this fairy-tale pact between people and things. In this video, a Congolese boy first painstakingly pushes a tire up the hill only to crawl into it and roll down at dizzying speed. It is replete with references to the mythical hero Sisyphus, who twice sought to overcome death and as punishment had to keep pushing a rock to the top of a mountain only to see it roll back down time and again. La roue, however, is nothing less than an annulment of this ancient Greek myth. Unlike Sisyphus, the Congolese boy of La roue has managed to join forces with the object that initially cost him so much effort: when he swiftly descends the hill after his long climb, it is precisely that heavy, rubber tire that gives him the pleasure of play he had been seeking all along. Moreover, La roue also addresses the essentially modern myth that man is lord and master of nature and can dispose over it as he pleases. The hill on which the boy plays is in reality a pile of waste from a mine, thus constituting tangible evidence of the plunder of natural resources and child labor. The playing child trans- forms precisely this place of exploitation and injustice into a vast space for play. In this video, nature is no longer an ‘outside’ to be dominated and controlled but a participant in the game.”
On the Nature of Play:
Francis Alÿs
In this workshop, we explored four of Francis Alÿs’ video works centered on children's games, reflecting on how play functions as a way of navigating, resisting, and reimagining complex realities.
Key Observations on the Nature of Play:
- Repetition and Rhythm: Many games involve repetitive movements that create a rhythm
- Materiality and Resourcefulness: Children use whatever is at hand, natural elements, waste, or discarded objects, to invent games or play their games. The material textures of play are deeply present and often beautiful.
- Physical sensations, touch, balance, ground, are integral to how children experience and shape their surroundings.
- Some games echo those from our own childhoods. Others, like songs or rules, carry historical memory, passed down or adapted in response to current events.
- Play becomes a way for children to interpret and respond to their environment, whether it's the disruption of COVID-19 or life in a mining zone.
- Against a backdrop of hardship, extraction, or control, play offers moments of joy, agency, and imagination. It becomes an alternative to systems of exploitation.
Page 17
On dealing freely with society's constructs through children’s play
In principle, these games are open to ever new, and different, participants. This creates a special situation: rather than a group of isolated individuals who encounter each other by virtue of certain similarities, the community of playing children is one of radical equality, and it is this way because everyone participates in the same activities. For this reason, children’s play creates a space where society’s codes of behavior, hierarchies, and gender roles may become visible but can be dealt with somewhat more freely.
Page 20
On nostalgia vs a vertical notion of childhood and memory
According to Deleuze, the second, “vertical” notion of childhood revolves around a memory that remains “pure”: for a moment, our childlike view of the world actually returns in its fullness, and we realize that we had mistak- enly considered it lost. …The Children’s Games are rooted in this second, “vertical” notion of childhood. These videos are primarily meant to be viewed by adults, but many of them retrieve from these short films an unexpected sense of rejuvenation, as if the child they once were has resurfaced for a very brief moment. That feeling cannot be fully captured by the term ‘nostalgia’ because it is much more immediate and, indeed, “pure.” The Children’s Games remind us of our own childhood, but they have nothing to do with the sense of lack and the awareness of loss that lie hidden in nostalgia.
Page 20
Interacting with the immediate environment
In many of the Children’s Games the children interact not only with each other and each other’s bodies or body parts but also with their immediate environment and with the many objects, small animals, and materials they retrieve within it. For example, the children make small holes in the ground and play a game with haphazardly found seeds (Children’s Game #26: Kisolo).
Page 22
La Roue and nature participant in the game
In the Children’s Games, La roue is one of the finest examples of this fairy-tale pact between people and things. In this video, a Congolese boy first painstakingly pushes a tire up the hill only to crawl into it and roll down at dizzying speed. It is replete with references to the mythical hero Sisyphus, who twice sought to overcome death and as punishment had to keep pushing a rock to the top of a mountain only to see it roll back down time and again. La roue, however, is nothing less than an annulment of this ancient Greek myth. Unlike Sisyphus, the Congolese boy of La roue has managed to join forces with the object that initially cost him so much effort: when he swiftly descends the hill after his long climb, it is precisely that heavy, rubber tire that gives him the pleasure of play he had been seeking all along. Moreover, La roue also addresses the essentially modern myth that man is lord and master of nature and can dispose over it as he pleases. The hill on which the boy plays is in reality a pile of waste from a mine, thus constituting tangible evidence of the plunder of natural resources and child labor. The playing child trans- forms precisely this place of exploitation and injustice into a vast space for play. In this video, nature is no longer an ‘outside’ to be dominated and controlled but a participant in the game.
Page 23
On objects and play
They do not elevate themselves above things or pass judgment upon them. For them, there is no essen- tial difference, let alone a hierarchy, between objects that have cultural or social significance and trash or goods that have become unusable. Benjamin also pointed out that children are
“irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry. In waste products they recognize the face that the world of things turns directly and solely to them. In using these things, they do not so much imitate the works of adults as bring together, in the artefact produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship. Children thus produce their own small world of things within the greater one”
Page 24
On play and that it leads to nothing
Play clearly belongs to the category of agir: after all, play has no prop- er, practical use and is primarily a response to the many possibilities that lie embedded in our immediate environment.
Play provides a zone of concentration where relationships and the interdependence of people, bodies, body parts, objects, materials, and even small animals are established purely on the basis of a set of agreed-upon rules