From Kharkiv to Cuba, the artist’s Ricochets at London’s Barbican Centre asks: what are the kids up to?
The first screen is the largest. A girl aged about eight spins on the spot, somewhere in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The white cartoon fox on the front of her T-shirt blurs in motion. She places her rainbow-coloured clogs expertly on the golden sand as she steps in and out of the shadows of her companions, who are also spinning. She knows she’s being filmed – a self-conscious smile occasionally appears on her face – but she’s fully absorbed as she works to maintain momentum, her arms flung out to steady herself, her burgundy skirt flaring into a circle. One of her friends collapses onto the floor, overcome with dizziness. The camera pans to the earth. The video ends, the screen turns black. And then the spinning begins again. A game that derives its joy from the fact you don’t need anything but your own body to play it is a fitting opener to Ricochets, Francis Alÿs’s exploration of how children improvise, creating worlds with whatever they have to hand in their environment.