Is there anything universal about childhood? In Francis Alÿs’s understated yet poignant video series ‘Children’s Games’ (1999–ongoing) – comprising around 20 works to date, with the latest due to premiere at this year’s Venice Biennale – the artist depicts young people at play. These short films (the longest is just over eight minutes) begin mid-action, without preamble: in the first, Caracoles (1999), a young boy kicks a plastic bottle up a sloping road in Mexico City. In the second, Ricochets (2007), three boys skip stones on the surface of a body of water on a grey day in Tangier. In all videos, the kids are largely without adult supervision and use whatever materials they have at hand. A group of very young children in Iraq’s Sharya Refugee Camp, for instance, improvise a game of hopscotch against the backdrop of an industrial fence topped with barbed wire (Hopscotch, 2016). The kids bicker, laugh, goad each other on, compete and learn. They have fun. The shots are intimate, but don’t feel voyeuristic; the children are clearly aware of the camera, and many seem to enjoy showing off.
Alÿs, who was born in Belgium but has lived in Mexico City for several decades, trained as an architect. Since he began his art practice at the end of the 1980s, his projects have often focused on navigating the urban landscape or bringing the latent violence and power structures of the built environment into focus. Well known for his own public interventions – such as heaving a melting block of ice through the streets of Mexico City for Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) (1997) – over the past two decades, he has made several works about the lives of children in places marked by turmoil. The playful behaviour shown in Silence of Ani (2015) – in which the artist gave bird-call-imitating instruments to a group of adolescents living on the Turkish-Armenian border to enliven their landscape with song – is contrasted, as in many iterations of the series, with the implied violence of their circumstances.