Francis Alys. The Nature of the Game

The first multidisciplinary analysis of one of the most impactful and popular contemporary artworks of recent years.

In 1999, a short video of a solitary boy kicking an empty bottle up a hill in Mexico City became the first instalment of Children-s Games, a series of works by artist Francis Al-s (b. Antwerp, 1959). The ongoing project, which now numbers around thirty-five works, has gradually given shape to an extensive collection of videos of children at play. For almost twenty-five years, Al-s and his collaborators F-x Blume, Julien Devaux, and Rafael Ortega have been travelling around the world to document the distinctive ways in which children interact with each other and their physical environment. They have gone from remote villages in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Nepal to the mountains of Switzerland and metropoles like Hong Kong and Paris, but have also visited the war-torn city of Mosul in Iraq, the border