Nardelli, Matilde ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4582-1024 (2025) State of play: Francis Alÿs’s Children’s Games. Senses of Cinema.

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Abstract

Over the past three decades, artist Francis Alÿs and his collaborators have been filming play across the world. Assembled between 1999 and the present, Children Games is an unsystematic, open ‘archive’ of over 40 short videos of children playing, filmed in over fifteen different countries. This open series is available to view and download under a commons agreement on Alÿs’s website, but it has also been exhibited in galleries as a multi-screen installation, the most recent of which, titled Ricochets, was at the Barbican in London in Summer 2024. This essay focuses on the ‘form(s)’ of Alÿs’s archive, exploring the elected mode of capture – the moving image – and the modalities of its exhibition as both ‘free circulation’ online and cinematic installation in a gallery space. It does so by weaving a dialogue between moving-image art and gallery studies and cultural-historical and psychological conceptions of play, by Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois and Donald Winnicott among others, as something akin to a state of being in an environment which is both crucially put to use and suspended.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	Film and television
Date Deposited:	23 Oct 2025
URI:	https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/14186
Sustainable Development Goals:	Goal 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions

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