It’s a hard heart that can leave Francis Alÿs’s Barbican exhibition without being a little broken by it. At the Barbican, the Belgian artist – best known for films where he performs walking actions, pushing a block of ice until it melts, kicking a flaming ball through a desolate border town – has taken himself out of the work, and turned his eye on children.
The gallery is an ear-blistering cacophony of infantile whoops and screams, dozens of screens showing kids around the world playing games. They skip stones on a lake, jump rope, race down a hill, roll huge snowballs, kick tyres down dirt roads, race snails with their shells painted blue and red. It’s a room of unbound, uncontainable joy, of burgeoning self expression and emerging independence, finding voice through play.
Because that’s what kids are meant to do, it’s what they’re built for. All these games from around the world are a way of testing out boundaries – between peers, between the self and the world – this is how these dumb-as-rocks little beings become actual humans. It’s beautiful, it’s inventive, it’s necessary.
These are the early steps in interpersonal disputes, this is embryonic proto-war.
But it’s not all ecstatic innocence. Kids in Cuba battle each other with flattened sharpened bottle caps, two little English girls smash each other’s conkers to bits, children are slowly isolated and excluded in a game of musical chairs. In learning to become humans, kids must also learn to compete, to fight. These are the early steps in interpersonal disputes, this is embryonic proto-war.
And real war looms, too. Many of these games are happening in refugee camps, in places torn apart by conflict. Football being played with an imaginary ball in Iraq, a kite being flown in Afghanistan just before the Taliban banned them, and then the shock of kids playing border guards, stopping cars to check papers in war-ravaged Kharkiv. It’s suddenly too real, too close to actual war and actual devastation to feel joyful, fun or innocent. These kids are playing out miniature versions of the world around them, and that world is brutal.
Upstairs, animations show games with hands – shadow puppets, thumb wars – and two rooms are designed for actual play. It might be that the work here is less good, less powerful, or it could just be that after the realisations downstairs, the damage is done.
The work is meant to be an archive of children's games, of the vital importance of play. But there's an unignorable context. You can’t walk through this show without now thinking of children in Gaza, Xinjiang, Ukraine, Sudan; children having their childhoods stolen, their play taken from them, their joy erased. Children learning that to become an adult is to learn to fight, and to lose innocence in the process.