In 2024 at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the Mexico-based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs exhibited films of children from across the world playing with sticks, hoops, marbles and other toys. The implication was clear: play feels and looks like a universal language but takes on specific local forms. Using this as a starting point, Playthings and Playtimes explores the conflict and contradictions that circulate when play is simultaneously recognized as a species attribute (part of human nature) and as something crucially differentiated across time and space by design, technology, sentiment, pedagogic values and so on. The chapters in this volume demonstrate this interplay between the fixed and the mutable. Topics range from the elaborate miniature worlds made by H. G. Wells and his sons to digitized fidget spinners, from avant-garde Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García’s wooden blocks to the playground spaces of Kuwait, and from the much-maligned plastic toy to the new museum Young V&A. Together, they bring play and the world of feelings into sustained contact with the history of material culture and design, psychoanalysis, childhood studies and other disciplines concerned with play culture. In the process, Playthings and Playtimes investigates key elements of a humanities approach to the modern world through the prism of play’s affective materiality.
