ExhibitionFebruary 21, 2023
Francis Alÿs: Children's Games, 1999-2022
Since 1999, Alÿs has been producing videos documenting the games played by children in streets and backyards worldwide. Juegos de niñxs is an ongoing archive of urban practices that modernization is banishing from everyday life, as the predominance of vehicular transportation and the monopolization of free time by electronic distractions disrupts the concept of public space. The exhibition, curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina and Virginia Roy, will be on view until September 17, 2023.
The children's amusements that Alÿs records are an endangered culture that united generations and crossed borders, but they are also extremely interesting for their conceptual implications. Many of these videos tend to be located in regions of the world where relative economic underdevelopment, and the strength of tradition and social communities, have sustained the shared life of childhood on the street. While they often have a direct ethnographic documentation value, they also metaphorically record contemporary societal changes and conflicts. Both because of the mysterious way highly dissimilar societies play certain games and because of the human value they share, they also appear as a vehicle of meaning that unites cultures and ways of life.
Many of these games, if not the entire series of Francis Alÿs' Juegos de niñxs, give off a utopian aura. They propose and document forms of self-regulated sociability, where children establish a diagram of their social relations on a competitive basis but without recourse to legislation or force. These political implications are one of Alÿs' main motivations for producing his work. For all these reasons, Juegos de niñxs is a project that goes far beyond the singularity of an artist: it is an essential archive for the future of humanity.
The videos of Juegos de niñxs have no commercial value and belong to the public domain under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. They can be viewed and downloaded at:
http://francisalys.com/category/childrens-games/
The children's amusements that Alÿs records are an endangered culture that united generations and crossed borders, but they are also extremely interesting for their conceptual implications. Many of these videos tend to be located in regions of the world where relative economic underdevelopment, and the strength of tradition and social communities, have sustained the shared life of childhood on the street. While they often have a direct ethnographic documentation value, they also metaphorically record contemporary societal changes and conflicts. Both because of the mysterious way highly dissimilar societies play certain games and because of the human value they share, they also appear as a vehicle of meaning that unites cultures and ways of life.
Many of these games, if not the entire series of Francis Alÿs' Juegos de niñxs, give off a utopian aura. They propose and document forms of self-regulated sociability, where children establish a diagram of their social relations on a competitive basis but without recourse to legislation or force. These political implications are one of Alÿs' main motivations for producing his work. For all these reasons, Juegos de niñxs is a project that goes far beyond the singularity of an artist: it is an essential archive for the future of humanity.
The videos of Juegos de niñxs have no commercial value and belong to the public domain under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. They can be viewed and downloaded at:
http://francisalys.com/category/childrens-games/
Gallery
