Belgium

Playing is something natural, something that we discover and learn instinctively in our childhood. It is an essential human need. It is necessary to take time, to spend time, and to “waste” time in playing. Children’s play is to be understood as a creative relationship with the world. Since 1999, Francis Alÿs’s camera has filmed children playing in the public space. It started with the video Children’s Game #1: Caracoles, showing a young boy kicking a bottle up a steep street, only to let it roll back to him and then kicking it up again. Observing, investigating, and documenting human behaviour in urban life is a constant in Alÿs’s work. His films record, in an ethnographical way, both the power of cultural tradition and the autonomous attitudes of children, even in the most conflicted of situations.