CHILDHOOD - THE WORLD SEEN THROUGH BINOCULARS

We offer you an essay in visual remembrance whose principal brush strokes form a game with the time(s) of childhood, constructed by means of a gaze that fastens on subjective archaeology and which rhymes with objects and things that reshape and rebuild the space of our childhood. Keeping watch somewhere in the little world are Father Christmas, Pinocchio, Nasreddin Hodja, Cinderella, the genie from Aladdin’s lamp, the little lead soldier, and, above all, the slightly askew bedtime stories told by our grandparents and parents, which often never reached their end because we used to fall asleep.

Mythological figures – cartoon heroes, personal heroes, eternal friends, fictional characters, fantastical local inventions – once more throng the collective imagination and powerfully reinvent memory and the remnants of the universal heritage of childhood.

At first sight a museum of childhood looks like a contradiction in terms, but still…

How big can a museum of childhood be? It might fit in a pocket, it might reach to the clouds, cut the world in two, enter a fairytale, hang on a coat hanger, or be whispered in the papelka tongue. One thing is certain: we all carry our own museum of childhood, whose doors are always open, from the story of the fates to angels with clipped wings.

Rummaging through drawers, you retrace the twisting path of the labyrinth. You enter the world of Piticot, you move your piece forward, you move it back, you miss a turn, maybe you’ll be unlucky and have to go back to square one…

For our game we have chosen a number of paths. Along one of them we zoom in and focus on the rituals and thresholds that mark and delimit the different ages of childhood, whether in the town or in the countryside.

Another image brings to mind our grandparents’ archive of baptismal names, forgotten and discarded in far distant times, the first imprint we make upon the life we have been given.

Another tells of the shared language of childhood, in which the involuntary pensées of little children build a world inhabited by the sun, God’s smell, angels, music, computers, peasants, friends good and bad, and, of course, favourite animals.

Before we end the game, we capture a few of the relationships that shape the little person and the big person, the character and the plaything that becomes a friend, the objects and their animated world, the peasant child and the urban pioneer, the act of cloud-gazing and the collector’s toy car, the belly button and the ultrasound scan, the world of our grandparents and our children. We speed downhill on our bicycle… We zoom in again and end the game by having another turn…