ALŸS AND THE COLLABORATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GAME AT SERRALVES
Francis Alÿs (Antwerp, Belgium, 1959) began, at the end of the last century, to abandon the exclusivity of his body as the subject of the actions of his artistic proposal to begin to explore the possibility of finding and employing other subjects for this purpose. With this idea, the figure of children gained more and more importance in his production and became the sign of identity of a new stage for the new millennium.
His video Children's Game #2: Ricochets (2007) is the nominal starting point for the exhibition now on view at the Serralves Museum in Oporto, the second time it has been shown at the Barbican in London. This exhibition is born, precisely, from that turn that he executes integrating more necessary agents in his practice and that elevates to collaborative the nature of his proposal, more oriented to that philosophy of collective without losing the body and its dynamics as a vertebral axis as well.
Ricochets explores this aspect from several exhibited works that navigate between video and animation and to which the tangibility of physical areas dedicated to the game has been added. The titles exhibited in the videographic part are framed within the production of more than three decades that the artist, based in Mexico, has produced around the world on the theme of children's play. This collaborative framework takes us, practically, to the philosophy behind the game, regardless of where the action is located, which, however, is the thesis that unites everything.
Among those works, there are other animated works created by Alÿs himself, more focused on the apparent executive simplicity of hand games, but that integrate, almost like instructions, the literalness of the theme and that can be executed during the tour, since the exhibition proposes a hybrid path with those physical spaces that encourage to put into practice the apparent theory, and that are also complemented with groups of small format paintings made in the last five years and that, illuminated, also open new ways of dialogue.
Ricochets can be seen until March 16, 2025 at the Serralves Museum, Dom João de Castro 210, Porto (Portugal).
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