Francis Alÿs: Exhibition guide

Each couple tries to save an orange from gravity. When it falls, the pair is eliminated. This exercise in collaboration involves intimacy: faces are only an orange apart. It involves embraces, though not loving so much as keeping the partner in tension. Pacifying their natural energy with an eerie, giggly humming, the children shuffle like old marrieds at a tea dance, united and separated by a scandalous orange globe. Eyes sockets and cheekbones prove useless against roundness; even the winning couple’s triumph is short-lived.

Children’s Game #34: Appelsindans, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2022; 4:06 min. In collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Julien Devaux, and Copenhagen Contemporary.

Grandma’s Footsteps in Britain, Red light, green light in North America, Thunder, weather, lightning in Austria, One, two, three, ciggy forty-three in Argentina, Frozen in Mexico, Statues in Greece – all refer to a game of stealth and balance popular around the world. While some versions rely on turning around at unpredictable intervals, these London kids play it with the regularly timed cry of 'One, two, three, freeze!'. The caller takes her time assessing everyone’s immobility, which ensures further wobbles. But she can only expel the most unstable, and the forwards progress won’t be stopped.

Children’s Game #45: 1, 2, 3, Freeze!, London, United Kingdom, 2024; 6:00 min. In collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Julien Devaux, Félix Blume, Eduardo Puhl, St Luke’s CE Primary School and Barbican.

Ordinary bottle tops, once flattened, threaded and tensed for spinning, become as sharp as gladiator swords. It’s edge against thrumming edge as the jousters try to slice their opponent’s string by means of feints, angles, and jabs. The players fight in such close proximity that the emotion of each move is magnified in their faces, as if to compensate for the necessary restraint of thrusts and parries – take that, oh no, how about this, oops close one… gotcha!

Children’s Game #41: Chapitas, La Habana, Cuba, 2023; 3:53 min. In collaboration with Julien Devaux and Félix Blume.

First recorded in the Isle of Wight in 1848, conkers was commonly played in the UK until it was banned from most schools in the early 2000s. Players alternate after three goes at exploding the opponent’s horse chestnut with their own. Points are assigned not to the handler but to the individual conker, as if it were a talented champion, like a racehorse; high scorers are often taken home and cared for. From the player, unerring aim rather than force is expected – we feel the frustration every time the target swings mockingly away. The fun part is when both strings get entangled, and the first player to shout 'snag!' wins an extra turn.

Children’s Game #46: Conkers, London, United Kingdom, 2024; 3:08 min. In collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Mariano Franco, Eduardo Puhl, Félix Blume.

Children getting into a frightful mess that only parents could sort out: this familiar scenario plays out subversively, for the rescuing 'Mother' is just a child. A circle turns into a knot as the kids entangle themselves, still clutching, ever more twistedly, the same hands. Once paralyzed, the group cries chorally for 'Mother' and she appears. With remarkable engineering flair, ‘Mother’ figures out how to unknot the knot without breaking the links of hands, shoving arms over heads and directing legs under and over. Suddenly, like a disentangled string of Christmas lights, the chain becomes circular again.

Children’s Game #35: Kluddermor, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2022; 4:56 min. In collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Julien Devaux, and Copenhagen Contemporary.

Born in the recent past in school playgrounds and now a national sport, Nzango is a female-only game. The aim is to imitate, or more mysteriously, anticipate, the leg movements of the facing player. The pace is set by both teams singing and clapping in unison, faster and faster. Local variants thrive, ignoring the official rules. This, the girls’ own invention, involves 'minus' and 'times' signs, the first a mirror image – A’s right leg, B’s left leg – the second a crossed diagonal. And yet all the outsider perceives is a series of lightning confrontations, as pairs, then other formations, hop and kick ecstatically, advance and retreat according to an inapprehensible logic, telepathically improvised, perhaps. What geometry rules the final blur of legs?

Children’s Game #28: Nzango, Tabacongo, D.R. Congo, 2021; 5:41 min. In collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Julien Devaux, Félix Blume and Picha Collective.

Stark though it is, the roof terrace with its low ochre-red wall and washed turquoise abstract seems the nearest thing to a garden among the forbidding cliffs of mass housing that rear up all around. Like bold tendrils of organic life, three young girls appear with jump ropes and show off some individual fancy licks, before switching to a stately coordination mode. Their bright white ropes make squiggles in the air like waved sparklers at night, while wrists and feet maintain a rock-steady beat. The joy of skilled movement, of pure synchrony, illuminates their faces.

Children’s Game #22: Jump Rope, Hong Kong, 2020; 5:28 min. In collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Julien Devaux, Félix Blume and Tai Kwun Contemporary.

The castle must be positioned just far enough from the sea to be completed before the tide reaches it. As the moat is dug by busy spades, the vacated sand forms a growing pile in the middle. Sea water starts to rise into the moat from below. As the waves break gently, closer and closer, the children dig faster to fortify the outer rampart with sodden sand. Even as the defences are being flooded, they work on shaping and firming the castle with hands and feet. The tide soon overwhelms the mini world and smooths the whole thing flat, leaving the children standing ankle-deep in ebb and flow.

Children’s Game #6: Sandcastles, Knokke-Le-Zoute, Belgium, 2009; 6:04 min. In collaboration with Julien Devaux, Cristian Manzutto, and Félix Blume.

First we drive past harrowing scenes of missile and bullet damage, into an area that’s still intact. At a crossroads not far from the frontline, three boys in fatigues, with wooden guns, act out a grown-up duty: to uncover Russian spies. The drivers, both soldiers and civilians, are cheered by the children’s playful solidarity. Cars are flagged down, IDs requested, trunks inspected. A password is demanded: Palyanitsya, the name of a traditional Ukrainian bread, and a word that Russians can’t pronounce right. As it happens, bread also is the universal symbol of life. 

Children’s Game #39: Parol, Region of Kharkiv, Ukraine, 2023; 8:02 min. In collaboration with Hanna Tsyba, Olga Papash, Julien Devaux and Félix Blume.

This ancient Chinese game is played between two people, who in unison say 'rock, paper, scissors' before 'throwing' one of the three figures at each other: closed fist or flat hand or two fingers in a V shape. Rock blunts scissors, scissors cut paper, paper enfolds rock. Each round is win, lose or – if both players choose the same 'tool' – draw. We see not hands but a shadow-play of hands against a pale background, as the two antagonists display the tremendous skill that kids alone can muster in what seems impossibly fast motion. 'Conceptual art,' you say, the kind you could watch for hours, the hands as synecdoche not of the body but of two bodies in a rhythmic frenzy of elegant interaction and dissolution. 

Children’s Game #14: Piedra, papel o tijera, Mexico City, Mexico, 2013; 2:51 min. In collaboration with Julien Devaux and Félix Blume.

An update of tag, the scariest of kids’ games. Instead of the touched person being 'frozen,' they are contaminated and activated as viral transmitters. Boys and girls sport face coverings, any colour but red, the colour of contagion, worn by the first It. On catching someone the tagger shouts 'Contagio!' and the victim echoes, 'Contagiado!' Infected! while changing into a red mask (already glimpsed peeping from pockets, in fatalistic preparedness) to become It. The last child standing cries 'Survivor!' In August 2021, 43 Mexican minors officially died of Covid; the true figure would be much higher. Tag was always about the menace of other people, but Contagio is brutally literal. 

Children’s Game #25: Contagio, Malinalco, Mexico, 2021; 5:30 min. In collaboration with Julien Devaux, Elena Pardo, Félix Blume and Imaginalco.

Neither indoors nor out, but on the doorstep, where you might play a quick game while waiting for someone. Girl and boy pile up candy wrappers, face down; elsewhere, for the game is widespread, it could be cards, tokens, any flimsy object with a front and a back. A lightning round of scissors-paper-rock decides who slaps first. The aim is to make the colourful, 'right' sides appear, and these wrappers can be claimed, yet are soon back in play. The siblings have identical profiles, and sometimes positions, like one person playing in a mirror. When the door opens and the someone appears, they rush off into their day. 

Children’s Game #38: Ellsakat, Azilal, Morocco, 2023; 4:54 min. In collaboration with Ivan Boccara, Julien Devaux, and Félix Blume.

With all the charm of flick soccer, Subbuteo, pinball, and other miniature passions, this is played on a small circle of stubby broken-off sticks like a frontier fort buried in the sand, enclosing two facing, immobile teams also made of little sticks. Resembling two giants crouched over cavernous goals, the competitors take quickfire turns thumbing a marble, careful not to touch anything else. The successful marble shoots in from the side or arcs with precision through the air. For a penalty, it is balanced on top of the defending palisade. Close-ups on fans, rapt faces and dusty feet, bare or in the moulded sandals that protect knees as often as feet. The ring of attention is bisected by a chicken scooting straight through people, the exact centre of the arena, people, and out, as if performing a dare. 

Children’s Game #27: Rubi, Tabacongo, D.R. Congo, 2021; 6:17 min. In collaboration with Julien Devaux, Félix Blume and Picha Collective.

A sprite in a blue pinafore, plimsolls, and white facemask flits through Hong Kong, enclosed in a quicksilver bubble of magic. Streets become the dull, slow backdrop to her vividness. Oblivious to storefronts and curious stares, seeing only the yellow lines and the cracks in the pavement, she snakes and two-steps around seams and lines without loss of élan, chanting spells that shade into vague sounds. 'Step on a line, break the devil’s spine, Step on a crack, break the devil’s back, Step in a ditch, your mother’s nose will itch, But if you step in between, everything will be keen!' By igniting her route with meaning, she briefly wrests public space from the commercial values this city lives by. 

Children’s Game #23: Step on a Crack, Hong Kong, 2020; 4:57 min. In collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Julien Devaux, Félix Blume and Tai Kwun Contemporary.

The most basic sense of fun improvises on chance gifts of the environment. Snow-fun is too immediate to need rules, either. One game suggests another. First a chaotic battle sequence, with snowballers spied on from behind tree trunks, a little hill to be conquered; then everyone unites to slide down a bigger slope, in squealing collective release. Finally, a massive snowball that is implored to roll downhill. Snow, so protean and malleable, so resistant in bulk; so soon to vanish. 

Children’s Game #33: Schneespiele, Engelberg, Switzerland, 2022; 5:26 min. In collaboration with Julien Devaux and Félix Blume.

The game is filmed from above in a single take, emphasizing the inexorable process of subtraction. Six children place five chairs in a row, facing in alternate directions. When the music starts, the players skip one behind the other around the chairs. When the music stops, everyone scrambles to occupy the nearest chair and one person is left standing. The loser carries a chair away, stomping out of shot to the left. The music starts again, and so it goes on until the winner claims the last chair. Then there is only an empty space. 

Children’s Game #12: Musical Chairs, Oaxaca, Mexico, 2012; 5:05 min. In collaboration with Elena Pardo and Félix Blume.

Boys stampede through the shells of small geometric homes, fancy boxes falling to bits in a dry-grass wasteland like futuristic ruins. The players flatten themselves behind walls, peer cautiously with half an eye from glassless windows. Each boy holds a piece of broken mirror and aims at the enemy with the light refracted by the sun. They can’t resist making shooting noises, though these burning bullets are flashes from millions of miles away. Wandering dots of brilliance seek bodies out. Once a player is blinded by the light, he slumps and dies. 

Children’s Game #15: Espejos, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, 2013; 4:53 min. In collaboration with Alejandro Morales, Julien Devaux and Félix Blume.

A street in golden evening light, lined with burnt-out cars and wrecked buildings. A dozen boys, between 8 and 16 years old, greet one another cheerfully. The East Bank of Mosul was liberated days ago; football is no longer haram, forbidden. The ball is lobbed into play. Except there is no ball. Re-enacting the trick they perfected under the rule of Islamic State, here is the beautiful game as mysterious dance: dribbles and dodges, leaps and headers, a display of fluid grace and unusual harmony: there’s no arguing over the whereabouts of the ball or whether it scored, was saved, or rolled into the bomb crater over there. Was football haram because it resembles a religion? This seems even truer where the ball is as invisible as any god and as real in its effects on human action. The ritual is interrupted by profane time, as a burst of gunfire scatters the players and the street is left holding its breath. 

Children’s Game #19: Haram Football, Mosul, Iraq, 2017; 9:11 min. In collaboration with Julien Devaux, Félix Blume and Ruya Foundation.

Shot in black and white in homage to Helen Levitt, the pioneering photographer of children chalking the streets of Harlem in the late 1930s, this film records individual acts of creation by children from two schools local to the Barbican Centre in London, including students with physical and neurological diversities. Marco goes for horseshoe-shaped patterns, before expressing his self in a spontaneous spatter; Jean-Luc builds oneiric form upon form; Charlyn’s creatures emerge in clear, expansive lines. For Ayesha and James, the chalk is not just a drawing tool but also a curious object for fingers to explore, like they do with the texture of asphalt or the powderiness of their marks. Sensation and imagination imbue every scratch of white on black these children make. 

Children’s Game #47: Chalk, London, United Kingdom, 2024; 15:17 min. In collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Julien Devaux, Félix Blume, Eduardo Puhl, Prior Weston Primary School, Richard Cloudesley School and Barbican.