Making Play

 

              

The Shop of Possibilities
A place where the curious meets the familiar.
As the last of the South London’s Gallery’s six residencies to take place on Sceaux Gardens estate, the project brief asked to develop a proposal that could evaluate the past and also speculate on how the project might continue in the future. Re-interpretations of the idea of an interactive play space were at the forefront of the questions explored.

The project asked many questions: can a space for ‘making play’ continue outside the gallery’s formal programme? Can it be owned and continued by the children and their families without that support? What kind of play will take place in that space? Will these activities draw on the work from the six residencies?

The Shop of Possibilities, or a dynamic play Library or archive integrates a series of familiar programmes with the aim of generating a space for curious activities; the shop aims to be a compressed playground, exhibition space, library (or live archive), studio (invention laboratory) and a re-use centre (of everyday objects). Over the course of the residency, children’s formal and informal games (invented and inherited) as well new invented ones were discovered, documented, sited on the estate grounds and linked to the social context. The collection is seen as a accumulative social play archive, where every day familiar objects and their stories (documented within the children’s domestic environments) reveal narratives and practices about the estate as well as open up new possibilities for play and play material. In this play context, the ‘re-use’ of loose parts has become part of the projects wider sustainability, both physically by re-cycling and re-using but also socially by exploring ideas from the  ‘Social Playground’ (Lefaivre; 2007) and extending play from the shop as a site to include the potential of the whole estate grounds and also to include their families (currently mothers) and the community (residents of the estate) in this process. 

Social play

 

The Shop of Possibilities looks at play from a social point of view, looking at how familiar social settings and domestic objects can become the sites for invention of play, as they are used in new and unexpected ways. researching these inventions reveals a hidden playground (the produce of the imagination and social interactions) and simultaneously set up a research into how these settings (site/culture/community) work and what is their specificity and practices.

As the familiar is reused or used differently it becomes curious, full of possibilities for re-interpretation and creativity. In Making Play project, we look further into this relationship between the familiar, the curious and the possible.

Through a series of playful activities (not directly defined as games) to explore:

Notion of curiosity and familiarity

Notion of ownership and continuity

Notion of collection and reuse (of material and space)

Notion of invention and possibilities: (the compressed playground)

For more information about the Making Play project please visit: http://www.southlondongallery.org/page/making-play