Since 1999, Alÿs has been producing videos that document the games that children play on the street and in courtyards around the world. Children’s Games is an ongoing archive of urban practices that modernization has been banishing from everyday life as the concept of public space is distorted by the domination of motor vehicles and free time by electronic diversions. Alÿs understands this archive both as a demonstration of their global currency across cultures and borders, and as a last attempt to at least preserve the images of a form of city life that seems condemned to become extinct in the near future. These are films related to a pervasive intention that traverses all of Alÿs’s city fables: to preserve and memorialize the resistance of inner-city living to the homogenizing forces of the so called rationalization of the world.
A significant part of the artist’s interest in those games is what he describes as their “rigour” and intrinsic elegance and rationality, and the way they imply the existence of something of a micro-society made with their players. They express and document forms of self-regulated sociability, in which children establish a diagram of their social relationships on a competitive basis without recurring to legislation or force. For all these reasons, Children’s Games is a project that greatly exceeds the singularity of an artist: it presents itself as an essential archive for humanity’s future.