PLAY AND DISPLAY

Play and Display is a collaborative work between an honours student from Wits (Molemo Moiloa) and two artists formally from FUNDA College (Smilo Hlatshwayo and Sipho ‘Smokey’ Radebe). The collaboration serves as the basis of the artwork, as continual workshops and interactions that in themselves serve as a relational aesthetic, exchanging thoughts and values and finding similar points of interest through dialogue. Strongly based in Bakhtin’s Dialogism, our continual communication does not merely answer, correct, silence, or extend a previous interaction, but informs and is continually informed by the previous interaction, whether this is an exchange and/or work. Dialogic literature is in communication with multiple works.

The artwork, Play and Display is thus less a conclusion or result of our continuous interactions and exchanges but rather a dialogic communication with them, a kind of taking part in and extension of conversation.

Play and Display centers around our interest in exchange and conversation. Play is symbolic of a larger macrocosm of relations, largely simplified and condensed in the rules, relationships, actions and reactions evident in daily childhood play. Play is a theme extensively explored from Kant to Durkheim due to its complex signage of greater world issues. We are also particularly interested in play in time, how games and ways of playing have changed over time. This would include the phenomenon of computer and television gaming, and the impact and reflections they impart on current society.

Play and Display takes the form of a series of relations or dialogues. The first being that of the collaborative artists, the second being playing with children and the third being a ‘manifestation’ in the form of video, site specific instillations and a ‘performance’ of the children playing in relation to these elements.

The second part of the series took place at Supreme College in Braamfontein. We spent an hour with a class of grade fours (aged aprox. 10), playing a game historically played in the townships called Chicago. None of the children knew how to play the game but caught onto the rules quite soon. We actively took part in the games, submerging ourselves within the dialogue rather than observing as outsiders. This was filmed, from within the game and would serve part of the ‘manifestation’.
It was interesting to interact with the learners, all of whom live in the immediate area. They live in flats, without gardens and mostly no parks. The school play ground is a small paved parking lot and exemplifies an urban existence that constricts ‘normal’ child expression and growth.

The third part of the series is to take the form of a manifestation at the Sub Station, Wit University. All attendants will be encouraged to take part, playing a number of games with the same grade four class from Supreme College. The substation will also house a site specific instillation by Smilo, on top of which, the games will take place. The instillation is a kind of maze of wire cabling and coloured duct tape. The wire and coloured tape, a feature of much of Smilo’s work, creates an ambiguity of the playful and the restrictive, the secure and the dangerous, a comment on the ambiguities evident in play. The video component of the ‘manifestation’ is footage from the second part of the series and serves partly as an indication of process but also as a work in itself, in conversation with that process.