Can Art Save the World? “The Nature of the Game” by Francis Alÿs might

A sense of urgency to save the world has permeated organization studies lately. Tackling “grand challenges” such as inequality, climate change, and violence is currently high on the research agenda (Ferraro et al., 2015; George et al., 2016). Can Art Save the World? That question came to mind as I left the Belgian pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia in the spring of 2022. I left full of hope and would have answered yes. The art installation by Francis Alÿs (Belgium, 1959) in the Belgian pavilion made me believe that making the world a better place is within our capabilities as researchers and as human beings.

Alÿs works in the twilight zone of art and social practice around the central theme of inequality arising from migration and globalization. He is known for his public interventions as for instance “When Faith Moves Mountains” (2002) in which 500 people displaced a mountain near Lima in Peru. This intervention was a symbolic act aimed at creating memories and launching an urban myth. The Belgian pavilion features “The Nature of the Game,” an installation in which several videos of children’s games from all over the world are shown.

Since 1999 Alÿs has filmed children playing in the public space. The exhibition “The Nature of the Game” shows a selection of new short films shot since 2017 in Hong Kong, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Belgium, Mexico, to name a few. The installation invites visitors to walk through a labyrinth of screens as if they were in the middle of a global playground. The films show how children turn simple, ordinary things—chairs, coins, sand, stones—into the raw material for their games. “Children’s Game #29 La Roue” for instance features a little boy who pushes a big truck tyre up a huge mine terril. Once high enough, he crawls into the tyre and rolls down, cheered on by his friends. Once down, he starts all over again. The perseverance, courage, and fun of that little boy contrast with the backdrop of the sadness and despair of the dump and the abandoned and polluting mine industry.

Alÿs made the installation as an homage to “The Children’s Games” (1565) by Pieter Breugel the Elder. Breugel’s painting features 230 children playing 91 games from the Low Countries. The meaning of the painting is still food for interpretation (Robert-Jones, 1997). The work is probably a metaphor because in the early modern era, games were viewed with some suspicion. The painting could be understood as a moral lesson that denunciates human folly. But it could also be an ode to the innocence, fantasy, and joy of children. In any case, the work shows a careful attention to the world of children, an encyclopedic urge to collect their games and a portrait of a 16th century public space. Like Breugel, Alÿs takes stock of children’s games. He collected street games from all over the world that have sometimes existed for thousands of years, but risk to disappear due to a lack of public spaces, the rise of social medias and digital games and parents’ increasing control over their children. Like Breugel, Alÿs portrays the society he lives in and offers us an allegory—children’s games representing an organized world.

Alÿs’ films show how children reinvent the world. A beautiful example is the film “Children’s Game #19 Haram Football” showing children in Iraq playing football with an invisible ball because football has been banned by IS. The ritual of football remains although the core object is absent. Haram football becomes a powerful act of resilience, resistance, and even mockery. Unlike press images, Alÿs shows laughing instead of crying children in areas in conflict. The recurrent pattern in the series of games is how children accept, integrate, and deny the world in their play. The films show all the aspects that come with re-inventing a world: competition and cooperation, boys and girls, creativity and conservation, and vulnerability and power.

The installation gave me hope. It brings back a world to which we all once belonged, a world we left, but to which we can return. It shows how the future generation overcomes absurd and harsh obstacles to play and have fun with each other. The at first sight innocent and playful films have great political power because of their poetic nature. It leaves potential answers to how we can save the world open. The installation “The Nature of the Game” is a metaphor appealing to our imagination and inviting us to reflect and take action: take back public space, have fun, and re-invent the world!

Besides for its hopeful message, the installation also appealed to me as a qualitative researcher. Like an ethnographer Alÿs travels the world and he collects, takes stock, contextualizes, looks for patterns, and shares data. He makes the familiar unfamiliar and turns the mundane into the hero of his films. He presents case studies on children’s games in which he deals with organizational themes such as public space, collaboration, creativity, fun, sustainability, play, globalization, and poverty and asks visitors to reflect, discuss, and act on this. But Alÿs is not a researcher, he is an artist. Unlike researchers, his work shows the complexity and ambiguity of the world rather than providing explanations and solutions. Unlike researchers, he shares his findings in exhibitions, publications, and on his website. The high sense of perfection in image and sound both in the design and the presentation adds to the persuasiveness of his work.

What can the study of organizations and organizing learn from “The Nature of the Game” in the Belgian pavilion? Using arts to understand organizational processes and outcomes is not new. Art has been used as inspiration, as an alternative mode of representation, and as an explicatory theory (Loacker, 2021). Art not only represents organizations, it also represents possible futures. It embraces openness and ambiguity and shows what the world can be. Art shows complexities and gives voice to silenced voices. “The Nature of the Game” gives voice to children—a group that is not heard in our field—and highlights (children’s) games—a topic that has received little attention in our field. We can learn much about collaboration, frustration, happiness, betrayal, perseverance, courage, and creativity by investigating playing children. Art help us to rethink and re-invent the world and thus (re)organize the world to make it a better place. That’s why I left the Belgian pavilion hopefully and I would have answered the question positively.

http://francisalys.com/category/childrens-games/

The Milk of Dreams. Biennale Arte 2022. 59th International Art Exhibition (23 April–27 November 2022).