Are kids’ games under threat?

We hear a lot about the rights of the child, but the first I heard of the child’s right to play was at the Barbican’s latest exhibition. Among the games-related facts in Francis Alÿs’s new show is a quote from Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children, confirming a child’s right ‘to engage in play and recreational activities’.

Are children’s games under threat? Alÿs thinks so. Children in Europe today, he laments, have a tenth of the freedom to roam that he enjoyed growing up in the 1960s in a Belgian countryside virtually unchanged since Bruegel. During the course of his travels in 15 countries over the past quarter-century, Alÿs has amassed a cinematic archive of children’s street games. He started in 1999 in Mexico, where he is based, with a boy kicking against the law of gravity by booting a plastic bottle uphill; since then, while filming in conflict zones, he has recorded other forms of youthful resistance.