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Children's Game
Kamilia, une jeune fille de onze ans, habite seule avec sa mère. Elle vit une expérience traumatisante, la rue qui était pour elle un terrain de jeu devient l'arène de ses luttes.
Children’s Game #7: Stick and Wheels
On a wide, gravelly mountain road, earth-coloured dwellings in the background, small boys scamper behind tyres of different thickness and circumference, beating them onwards with a stick. A donkey brays in sympathy. The thin, flexible tyres of bicycles are the hardest to keep upright, especially when performing turns (slowing and tilting the rubber..
Children’s Game #25: Contagio
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, “Contagia..
Children’s Game #2: Ricochets
The bay is peaceful, framed by low hills in the distance. Three boys stand thigh-deep in the brown water, trousers rolled up. The biggest, on the left, is proficient in the art of stone-skimming: sending flat pebbles spinning over the water in such a way that they bounce off the surface as many times as possible before sinking. The middle boy feeds..
Children’s Game #3: Coins
We see three kids from behind, standing at a set distance from a peeling, whitewashed wall. The rule is that each player throws a coin against the wall, that drops and rolls back on the pavement; the player whose coin remains the closest to the wall can keep the other players’ coins. As we watch, though, the coins tinkle everywhere, several flung..
Children’s Game #4: Elastic
Close-up on shiny boots, knotted elastic, cobbles. Within the confines of a courtyard two demure little girls are playing a game of confinement, entrapment, escape. An elastic band has been stretched into a rectangle around four points –the legs of one girl and of a chair. At first the rectangle is positioned close to the ground. Silent with conc..
Children’s Game #5: Revolver
The props in this game are wooden sticks or branches shaped like guns. Two kids pretend to fire at each other, making elaborate and highly varied shooting noises. A further dramatic element is the creative use of whatever lends itself in the vicinity –dustbins, trees, walls, abandoned cars– to improvise scenes inspired by war films and westerns..
Children’s Game #6: Sandcastles
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 sodd..
Children’s Game #8: Marbles
This game requires considerable practice and precision, especially on the uneven terrain of an urban waste lot. The action consists in flicking a marble with thumb and index finger so that it reaches a hole in the ground in the fewest possible stages, ideally knocking away other marbles in its path. The player can keep any marble he has knocked out..
Children’s Game #9: Saltamontes
Girls and boys, together for once, hunt through lush grass and undergrowth, on the lookout for well-camouflaged grasshoppers. When one is found its hind legs are pulled off, though not its wings. Each child hurls his or her grasshopper up into the air, where it flutters against the sky above the upturned faces of the skipping, wheeling children. Un..
Children’s Game #10: Papalote
A 10-year-old boy in a pink salwar kameez stands near a dune-coloured wall under a powder-blue sky. He frowns and gesticulates, conversing in stops and starts with the heavens or at least with the gusting wind because you don’t see his kite at first, and the string is so fine you can’t see that either. What you see is a body interacting with un..
Children’s Game #13: Piñata
A piñata is a papier-mâché figure stuffed with sweets. Common at birthdays in urban patios, here we find it in a field, where a garish Superman dangles between tall poles on a rope jerked by an adult, to make hitting harder. Each player is blindfolded and spun around several times before attempting to hit the piñata with a long stick. The kids�..
Children’s Game #15: Espejos
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 r..
Children’s Game #16: Hopscotch
Outside a stark tent city, this version of the game involves a grid of squares, two across by six long, marked by lines gouged into the arid ground. The player tosses a stone into the grid and starts hopping up one side of it to where the stone lies, careful to land only once in each square or station. When the stone is reached it must be kicked or..
Children’s Game #17: Chunggi
Reminiscent of male football tricks where a ball is juggled frontally off the knee or foot, Chunggi, popular among Nepalese girls, appears a lot more difficult. It involves a light bundle of leaves, as green and gathered as the school skirts of the players, that is repeatedly thrown up sideways with the outside or the inside of the foot while hoppi..
Children’s Game #18: Knucklebones
Knucklebones, or jacks, has existed for more than 2000 years and was first played with the astralagus bones of a sheep. This version –played with stones by two girls seated on the landing of a concrete stairway, people’s legs and occasional monkeys passing by– is close to the Korean Gonggi, with no separate ball. The turn begins by throwing a..
Children’s Game #26: Kisolo
Kisolo is one of a thousand variants of the global Ur-game, Mancala, a “sowing” game sometimes still played with seeds even when using a board. Its timeless agrarian gestuary follows the combinatorial rules of what is also a “count and capture” game. After ruining several carving knives on digging holes in the hard orange earth, two players..
Children’s Game #27: Rubi
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..
Children’s Game #28: Nzango
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’..
