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Francis Alÿs is presenting The Nature of the Game in the Belgian Pavilion (Flemish Community) as part of the 59th Venice Biennale, from 23 April to 27 November 2022. The exhibition curated by Hilde Teerlinck, will feature a selection of new short films related to his series of children’s games, a body of work started in 1999 which has gained a central position in his practice. The films were shot during Alÿs’ recent travels to Hong Kong, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Belgium, Switzerland and Mexico. Filming without interfering in the games, Alÿs reveals the hidden rules of playing, the ingenious interaction of the children with their environment, their deep complicity and their hopeful mood and joy.
The installation in the Pavilion invites the visitor to walk through a labyrinth of screens as if they were in the middle of a global playground. The sound and image of the different films interact with each other, fragments forming together a whole, allegories translating the complexity of a sometimes harsh [removed];A series of paintings covering a period from 1994 to 2021 accompanies the presentation providing the context in which some of the films were made. From Kabul to Ciudad Juárez, from Jerusalem to Shanghai, they unfold Alÿs’ distinct poetic sensibility towards social and political concerns.
As anthropologist David MacDougall writes, “Taken together, these films reveal some wider truths: that many children’s games are specific to girls or boys, that most are competitive but also cooperative, and thatchildren are adept at making do with little, adapting a wide range of environments and spaces for their own purposes. In this they create a world parallel to that of adults, one that overlaps with it but uses its physical resources quite differently.”
However, children’s games tend to disappear. The rise in urban traffic, social medias and digital games and the parental fear of letting children play in the public space means that the tradition of playing outdoors becomes less common each day. This process might have experienced an acceleration due to the consequences of COVID-19 in the last few years, creating an urgent need to register them, now.
The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by DCV Books. It is a facsimile edition of Alÿs’ notebooks on children’s games, something overall very visual. Anthropologist Michael T. Taussig, for whom fieldwork notebooks are an indispensable tool, argues that drawings in notebooks develop a life of their own, a life which is often fed by what can’t be written down.
On the occasion of the opening days of the Venice Biennale, the gallery will be exceptionally closed on 20/04.
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