PLAY AND DISPLAY

Play and Display in Pimville

2010-03-15T04:01:00.000-07:00

Strikingly different to the sessions in Braamfontein.
These, and many other, Soweto kids play Chicago and tin box like pros. Easy in the politics, simple in the rules, up in your face in the game. These kids are confident and capable and take these games in their stride. Just another day "on my block".

Its boys versus girls as usual but there's no really indication of who's better at it. There is a hierarchy though and those not welcome - are not welcome. If you're too young and could get hurt, stay on the sidelines. If you're too old and will hurt others, don't even bother coming near here.

The games run at a frantic pace, this kids through hard and jump fast. bobbing and weaving, throwing and catching, placing as many can as you can between your feet and kicking them into the crate. when they're all in. turn the crate over and start again.
Every now and again this is interrupted by a car that drives down the road, disturbing the tempo for just a minute as it ambles by. Once passed, the kids shuffle the crate pack into the centre of the hot tarred road and get on with it.

The sky is large in Soweto, the buildings do not break it. not high enough. The sense of encroachment and chaotic clastraphobia felt in the cooped-up car park in braamfontein isnt felt here. Rather, the sun beats down on a lazy afternoon as people get back from work after the long trek that apartheid architecture still traces adn homes begin to light up. Its summer so there are still a couple of hours left for kids to do their thing, before their freedoms are temporarily reigned in and they're told to get indoors.
The pavements are short, a kind incline and a narrow way so most people doont really use em. Old lady's and young men alike walk through the bouncing tennis balls and flying cans without batting an eyelash... and for good reason.
Play is part of the fabric here. Kids are given their space. boys and girls are free to duel.

Watch the Trailer

2010-03-15T03:54:00.000-07:00

School Play

2010-03-08T11:30:00.000-08:00

The first time we set about on this project it was with a innercity kids at a school called Supreme College in Braamfontein. grade one to matric all learn (or not) in green jerseys and yellow shirts in a three story grey block of cement on the corner of Jorrisen street. At about 1 o'clock tonnes of primary school kids stream out of its office-type doors and make the streets and in particular the bus stop across the road their play ground. 7 to 18 (many probably older) all get themselves to and from school so there's no rush and not much to look forward to. The class we played with all live in apartments in Braamfontein, Hillbrow and Berea and when they get home its just four walls and homework to contend with.

They didn't know township games so we had to teach them the rules. It took a little while and though the tricks and nuances where never quite grasped, all hell breaks loose when kids get off class early to play games instead of reading and writing. Most couldn't catch and few could throw. We played on their playground: a paved grey car park with a cockeyed and torn car shade on the one side and the makeshift tuckshop on the other. 6 by 8 meters at max. This concrete playground is shaded by the high walls that surround it keeping it dark, except where the sun ekes its way through the cracks and slits and there it makes up for its losses and glares bright, bouncing of the concrete walls.

These kids are wild. Not just kid wild, but off the wall wild.
They scream and yell, not just at each other but even at inanimate objects. Not for a response but just for the sound.
They climb and run, not anywhere in particular but just so they move.
The sense is of the air confined, released as a storm. A storm of grey, bright light and green and yellow uniforms.

They fight and sulk and cry and yell and demand every ounce of attention they can get from whomever will give it to them. They are brave and bold little children. Big in character, small in insecurity. They smile beautiful smiles and laugh beautiful laughs. They are a group of individuals, no doubt. And they know it.

PLAY AND DISPLAY

2010-02-08T02:14:00.000-08:00

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.