Summer, children's games, a hall of mirrors
Hey all,
Hope everything’s going well with you!
SUMMER HEY
Things here are pretty okay! In June and July I deliberately didn’t plan very much fun stuff, because I thought that I would maybe write a whole book, that perhaps I could be one of those people who gets absorbed and overcome and sits in a room and types a lot and then emerges six weeks later blinking pale into the sun with a manuscript clutched in her hand. Which I’m sorry to say I did NOT do, and in fact I wrote barely any book at all. So I tried another approach for August: I frantically overscheduled myself with going places and seeing friends. Emails and writing and other bits of work would fit into the gaps and be grateful for them! No more would I allow them to spread listlessly over whole empty days! And actually that’s been going better - I still haven’t written a whole book or anything but I have written more than I did in the supposed idyll of nothingness that was June and July.
And also, I’ve done some nice things! Nothing remarkable, but you know: watched swans on the canal, had a coffee somewhere, read a book in a bar and felt fancy about it, tried to ignore the slight friction of humidity on a day that wasn’t even all that warm, ate a scone, convinced myself it’s a moral good to drink a spritz or a pint of beer as long as it’s after 4pm and I’m sitting outside sort-of vaguely near a body of water or an arts centre.
RICHOCHETS AT THE BARBICAN
Yesterday to finish up August’s look-at-things theme I popped over to Ricochets, the Francis Alÿs exhibition at the Barbican. (Only running until this Sunday!)
The heart of the show is a collection of short films of children playing, and these are all really good; they give you such a sense of how the game works and what the kids are like. Sometimes I think the game is being enacted rather than played, there’s definitely a sense of “show the cameras how it works”, but that doesn’t really compromise the experience of the films: showing someone else how to play is also a part of playing.
The individual films, which are also available online, make you think all the things you’d expect: “oh, I used to play this game”, “oh my god this is so DANGEROUS god kids at play feel totally indestructible don’t they”, “this game is a bit like that game”, “this game is very unlike that game”. You think oh kids really are the same all over, but also you see a game that’s just wild and think ha ha what. One group plays a game, Espejos, where they use bits of broken mirror to reflect the sun at each other; if it flashes into your face, you mime a dramatic death.
And you notice how the games depend on the specific affordances of the place they’re played in, snow or a lake or ruined buildings or a busy road, stones or trees or painted patterns or chalk. Maybe you think about the times when the kids are playing in covid masks. Maybe you also think about how when it’s a group of younger kids, everyone’s playing, but the older the group is the less likely it is to include girls. Or you think about the way spaces for outdoor play, public play, have changed in the last ten or twenty or fifty years. Or you think about the huge differences in the environment the kids are playing in: the shells of abandoned houses, a road near a slumping bombed-out building, a forest, a park, a terrace on a high-rise apartment building, maybe you notice who has specialised equipment and who is improving things from scrap. Or you think, of course you think, about the children who are playing games in cities where those games have been banned, and the kids who are playing in war zones, as several of the groups are.
Anyway. The films are good. They do what they’re trying to do. But actually I want to talk about the exhibition design which was excellent.
The films themselves are gathered on the ground floor, mostly in one large space, with a few off in their own alcoves. Some are projected, some are on screens of different sizes. The sound for all of them plays out loud, and this works so well, the feeling of being in a playground filled with children, and their voices and shrieks and footsteps and laughter overlapping.
Also: there are so many seats! I can’t remember the last time I saw so many seats at an exhibition. Broad grey benches integrated into the architecture, and a BUNCH of little wheeled stools scattered around. I’ve never seen anything like the stools at an exhibition before, and they were brilliant, people would drag them around to where they wanted to sit, and kids would kind-of flop across them with their chest and kick off with their feet, wheeling themselves around the space.
I have read a bunch of pieces pleading for seats in exhibitions, talking about their importance, about accessibility, I’ve seen these essays linked approvingly by people in all sorts of different positions in galleries and museums, and I do not think I have ever previously been to an exhibition that felt busy but also had enough space that everyone there could, if they wanted, sit down. (Including multiple exhibitions I’ve curated myself.)
Alongside the films, there are tiny paintings of people in public space, nestled into corners and gaps. You have to go up quite close to see them, these little delicate moments. Honestly I didn’t love most of the paintings as paintings - nothing wrong with them, they just didn’t quite work for me - but their scattered-round distribution was lovely, the implicit treasure hunt, the way it invested each of them with significance.
And upstairs, on the mezzanine floor that loops in a figure eight around the main gallery space, there was a great view of the raucous downstairs playground but also a lot of quiet context and space. One almost entirely dark room, and away in the corner another very small dimly-lit painting of a boy in the forest, covering his eyes against a tree, like he’s counting down for hide and seek. Gorgeous placement. A room with just a projector in one corner, shining into the opposite corner, an invitation to make shadows. A big space with four tiny floor-level versions of the stools from downstairs, and - usually - kids sitting and lying on them and propelling themselves around. (I took this photo in one of the very brief gaps between groups.)
The top floor is also home to a lot of historical documentation of play. Nothing exhaustive, just a load of little things to look at, if you want to. Here’s some old pictures of people playing tug-of-war games. Here’s some games with balls. Diagrams and drawings and pages from books, all printed on cardboard and propped up in a big loop around the mezzanine floor, enough of them to absorb as much attention as you care to give. The hopscotch section had a Maya Angelou poem, and a set of diagrams from a 1978 Chinese magazine, and a Norwegian painting, and a Palestinian illustration, and an American lino print, and a French engraving from the nineteenth century, and a diagram of a Mexican hopping game. Look at this stuff, maybe think about it a bit! Isn’t it neat!
A little detail I loved: one of these clusters of images was about making shapes with your hands and casting shadows. And I saw a woman and a kid look at those prints, and make the shapes with their hands, and walk around the loop back to the alcove with a big projected light so they could try the shapes out, keeping their hands cupped like a swan or a wolf as they walked, like they were carrying the shape gently, trying not to spill it.
OKAY, SOME OTHER THINGS I LIKED RECENTLY
Ice-cream at Darlish - strong recommend for the rhubarb, pomegranate and rose sorbet in particular (if anyone has any other London-based ice-cream or gelato recs please let me know)
Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick The Latch, such a funny weird agonising novel, all based on transcribed interviews with a horse trainer; everyone raved about it when it came out a couple of years ago and it turns out they were right
I was recently a guest on Simon Parkin’s excellent podcast My Perfect Console, and had SUCH a fun time talking about five videogames I love a lot, if you want to hear my opinions on Yoshi’s Island and the open-source ripoff of Dance Dance Revolution then this is the place to do it
And I was in Scotland for a week, strong recommend for this also
ONE THING I RECENTLY DIDN’T LIKE BUT DID FIND INTERESTING
Okay, so I was in Scotland partly to see friends and family and partly to do an event at the Edinburgh Book Festival, which was just great. And they put me up in an actual hotel - which I barely realised Edinburgh even has at festival time. I’ve been up to Edinburgh in August for work a few times and the accommodation has generally been, you know, “Mattress on a ledge that’s been built a foot below the ceiling of someone’s laundry”, “B&B where you share a bathroom with five other people and a laminated A1 poster explaining how to open the windows and why you shouldn’t do it” etc. Not complaining, I believe a friend was once put up on a mattress that he could unroll at 2am each night behind the bar in the venue he was doing work for, the places I stayed could definitely have been worse. But an actual hotel? Incredible!
It was one of those newfangled rooms where there’s not a separate bathroom, just a kind-of notional bathroom corner with stalls for the toilet and shower. Which, sure, why not, saves on walls I guess. The shower stall was, a little surprisingly, mirrored on two of the four inside walls, which, again, fine I guess, maybe some people like to see multiple reflected copies of themselves from various angles while they wash. But the actual shower drained so slowly that when I turned the tap off I was ankle-deep, water lapping high against the incredibly strong seal at the bottom of the door. And along with, presumably, everyone else who’s stayed in that room, the latest in a long line of silent strangers, I had to stand for perhaps another five minutes while I waited for the water to drain enough that I could open the door without flooding the carpets. Just standing there! Looking at a blank wall, contemplating the nature of cleanliness, thinking how rare it is now for me to stand and do nothing and not have my phone, my clean ankle-deep body reflected with startling abundance all around as the steam slowly dissipated and the mirrors became clearer and clearer. An Experience for sure but if you’re considering bathroom renos, don’t go for a slow-draining hall of mirrors for the shower I reckon.
Okay speak soon, I should send this now so that if it makes you want to go to the Ricochets exhibition you’ve got a couple of days to squeeze it in,
Holly