Leaping at “Elastic”: Resourceful Play, Perpetual Replayfulness, and the Inflexibility of the Museal Dis-playground

“Not by any stretch of the imagination.”  That is what a friend of mine used to say—and perhaps says it still—whenever something struck him as unreasonable or preposterous.  Considering how firmly the expression remained stuck in the layers of my neocortex after all those decades, much struck him that way—and, to this day, much does strike me the wrong way about it.  Possibly, I am not flexible enough in my definition of “friendship,” but that one did not endure.

“Not by any stretch of the imagination.”  Seriously? I mean, any? It makes me want to object that the imagination is, or can be, more tensile than the minds of those who utter the phrase seem capable of conceiving.  And while the characteristically flexuous line of reasoning I am giving over to it might stretch anyone’s patience, elasticity—both literal and metaphoric—is very much at the heart of these idiosyncratic reflections on children’s games and childhood memories, on contemporary art—creative practice “by any stretch of the imagination”—and the role cultural institutions such as museums play in keeping alive memory that, collective though it may be, can be profoundly and confoundedly personal. 

It was my encounter with Children’s Games by Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist Francis Alÿs in the summer of 2025 that made me launch into the matter, belatedly as ever, creatively to prolong my experiences, whether they last minutes or extent to more than half a lifetime.  

The fact that I am posting this entry on what, in many parts of the world, is commemorated as Mother’s Day, enters into the anfractuous musings that follow.

“Not by any stretch of the imagination.”  When it comes to my family, I have long failed to imagine being part of happy reunions.  Nor have I always displayed a great willingness to reach, like a Gumby of Gandhian resilience, beyond anger or petty disagreement, to bridge what I sought to burn.  Instead, I imagined myself stretched out in the coffin, the only mode I envisioned, for many years, capable of transporting me back to the place of my youth.  

I mean, the country where I spent practically all of my youth (meaning, childhood and extended adolescence), not the realm of childhood that extends far into the distant regions of my by now less than reliable memory.  After all, we cannot relegate to a casket and summarily dispose of what we are obliged to carry with us for the rest of our lives—or at least to the point where memory fails us altogether.

Would my otherwise open mind, recalcitrantly narrowing at proffered invitations to family gatherings and high school reunions, be broadened by encounters with a nagging bygone that refuses to be laid to rest like ashes that, having escaped their designated urns, are scattered to the winds now graying my face?

Besides, what is left of that former life apart from a seemingly random amalgam of fading recollections that—all of them fragmented, many of them flimsy and some of them downright false—linger unrelentingly, loitering on the threshold of consciousness, to inform or impinge on the now, exacting retribution for my neglect and demanding my acknowledgment of their hold over me?

I would resent seeing the label “nostalgia” attached to it—“it” being a long-supressed residual curiosity, a desire to perform the practically impossible, or, rather, the impractical possibility of journeying back in space to connect, by way of now distant but once close relations, the remote dots punctuating the continuum to align my present self here in Wales, as approached via New York City, with my German birth, childhood and adolescence.

A return to my family home—and the time capsule of a mid-1970s bathroom—in the frigid gloom of late November back in 2022 resulted in Retroactive Selfies, a queer personal narrative project that continues on Instagram to this day.  I used to photograph myself in that parental bathroom; and seeing this most private but somehow least sanitary of sanctuaries again after all those years brought back memories, not all of which welcomed, with an unforeseen vengeance.  

Since that visit, the bathroom has been dismantled, and I doubt Retroactive Selfies would have had quite the urgency without the sensation of standing in that tub once more—fully dressed this time, and only for a few minutes, while I excused myself from the dining room table during a short reunion with my mother.

If, coming back to that house again in the summer of 2025, I experienced rather less unease, it might have been that, this time around, I determined to retreat still further— beyond adolescence, complicated as that period was by the specter of a deadly plague now known as AIDS, which overshadowed my coming out—into a childhood that, anxious though I, a latchkey kid, was even then, was lightened by a creative resourcefulness and a capacity to inhabit worlds of my own making, to get lost in play and find my place in the rules-governed alternative reality of games.

Call it navel gazing—or omphaloskepsis—if you like, but, self-indulgent as the act may be, contemplating the umbilical is a way of looking askance at a life-defining relationship that is predicated, first and foremost, on forceful separation.

As if designed to facilitate the processing of childhood memories, the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf—which I visited for the first time in my life in 2025—staged an exhibition titled MAMA (12 Mar. – 3 August 2025).  My sister took me on the day of my return to Wales, which, incidentally, was also the show’s final day.  

Of all the captions—at times didactic but generally engaging—this one, quoted here in part, resonated the most with me:

In German, the term “mutterseelenallein” describes the maximum intensification of loneliness.  It is composed of three root words, which translate as “mother”-“soul”-“alone” (Mutter-seelen-allein).  Although there are various theories about its origin and original meaning, one thing is certain: its force stems from the idea that losses in connection with motherhood are the most consequential that a person can experience—be it the loss of a child, a mother or the possibility of motherhood.

As a child, I often felt that way, “mutterseelenallein”—unwanted by my mother, who, like my father, worked to make ends meet and to prove to their parents that they, by being upwardly mobile, could amount to something in their eyes.  

It took me half a lifetime more fully to appreciate that my mother was still a teenager when my older sister was conceived, and that the person whom my sister and I saw as “Mama” and “Mutti” (to this day, we have different words for our surviving parent, an unclear distinction and word choice with which my mother plays along) did not have much a chance to define womanhood as anything but motherhood, and how that complicated our relationship with her, and no doubt, my mother’s relationship with her husband.  

I gather that, when it comes to the image children have of their parents, or the concept they have of parenthood, their imagination—the capability of imagining a parent as anything other than a caregiver, presumably for life—is curtailed by a survival instinct that makes us children, no matter our age, inflexible in our thinking. 

While I never had children, I know what it means to let relationships and roles define our life—a definition arrived at, I imagine, at the expense of certain undefined dimensions of my being.

Subtitled “From Maria to Merkel,” MAMA featured a vast array of disparate but related objects, from birth control pills to breast pumps, from Nazi propaganda to Barbara Kruger’s iconic “Your Body is a Battlefield” (1989).  

Familiar though some of the featured artists were to me, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Hannah Höch among them, I was reminded, again, just how far apart I had drifted from German political discourse, being that I left my native West Germany just as the Berlin Wall came down.  I never got to experience the hold that “Mutti Merkel” had on a legally if socially precariously united Germany.  That means, much of what I intimately associate with Germany is childhood experience and adolescence, which made me perhaps differently receptive to some of the works on display.

A day prior to our trip to the Kunstpalast, my sister and I went to Cologne to see Children’s Games, a long-durational project by Francis Alÿs that demonstrates, through specific examples, how children interact playfully—but no less seriously and determined—with each other and their at times hazardous surroundings, from battlefields of war to biologically toxic environments. 

Having just met a select group of high school friends for the first time after a number of decades as part of that same trip, I was in a reminiscent mode.  At my aunt’s place and my mother’s house, I had rephotographed a great many snapshots of family life, catching up with my, to me, for the most part, still recognisable former selves.

Not that there are many pictures of me at play.  The parental camera did not come out of the drawer for everyday occasions, for time spend socializing on the streets of our working-class neighborhood.  Perhaps this neglect was what convinced Francis Alÿs to capture how children survive, ludically, outside the sphere of supervising or indifferent adults.

Unlike most of the family photographs, the videos shown as part of Francis Alÿs: Kids Take Over (Museum Ludwig, 12 April – 3 August 2025) regenerated mental images of hours spent playing outdoors.  One game that I was surprised and delighted to see featured in the exhibition was Children’s Game #35: Kluddermor, which I knew as Knotenmutter, hilf uns! (“Mother of Knots, help us!”).  

Apparently of German origin, as I read elsewhere, it is a game in which children, holding hands at all times, contort their bodies jointly to form a human knot for one player to untangle. Twister is amateur by comparison.

Another game, Elastic, which I remember as Gummitwist, requires little more than a long strip of waistband and a few agile contestants.  Apparently, Elastic originated in China more than two thousand years ago.  The rules, such as they are, were explained, albeit not entirely as I recall them, in one of the captions that accompanied the videos projected onto large screens suspended from the ceiling of a darkened gallery space.  

Elastic—a roughly eight-minute video Alÿs recorded in Paris in 2008 in collaboration with visual artist Julien Devaux (b. 1975)—shows what the caption describes as “two demure little girls”

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 concentration, the girls take turns bracing the elastic and performing a prescribed sequence of jumps on and around the tensed bands.

Ankles are entangled and then jump free.  As the elastic rises higher, more and more of the body is involved in skilful contortions and athletic, perilous choreography.  There’s no ultimate winning, just getting better at the dance.

What stands out to me—and what I remember to be true—is that Gummitwist was a game played by girls.  As a boy who knew he was gay since he was five, I was always playing with the girls I assumed to belong with, even though those girls did not always recognize or appreciate me as one of their own, especially once puberty hit us all so hard that we felt forced to retreat into camps.

Children’s Game #4: Elastic is an earnest, documentarian, and almost joyless video.  Nearly silent, except for the sound of shoes hitting the pavement, it is also devoid of music. The Gummitwist I recall was accompanied by rhymes not unlike the ones recorded in the early 1960s by Tony Schwartz, a New York City archivist of sound I took the opportunity of discussing in my anthologized essay “A Forefront in the Aftermath? Recorded Sound and the State of Audio Play on Post-‘golden age’ US Network Radio.”

Some of the songs Schwartz recorded were released commercially as an album titled You’re Stepping on My Shadow (1962).  If Schwartz had recorded the sounds of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, no doubt a clearer and noisier picture than Children’s Game #4: Elastic would emerge of my youth at play.

Of the few German rhymes surviving to this day, I recall “Teddybär, Teddybär, dreh dich um.  Teddybär, Teddybär, mach dich krumm” (“Teddy bear turn around and bend”).  The singing helped keep us to pace.  It also focussed the performers as they skilfully jumped and twisted the rope around their ankles to demonstrate how elegantly to extract yourself.  

It could get deucedly intricate.  And while some of the girls were dressed—as dictated, no doubt, by their parents—in their Sunday best, the game was less “demure” than it was determined—an exercise of extricating yourself from imposed, even seemingly self-imposed, restrictions.

In that most ominous of years, 1984, the German New Wave song “Gummitwist”—inspired perhaps by the 1983 thriller War Games starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy—confronted mythical childhood innocence with Cold War terror and the advent of the age of the home computer (“Papi, schenk mir einen Computer”—papa, get me a computer) that would eventually succeed in putting an end to the many ways in which children learned to socialize while scraping their knees on the pavement.

While Children’s Games, with its videos produced in the twenty-first century, suggests that games like “Elastic” are alive and their players kicking, there was no scraping of knees in the gallery.  As much as I appreciate experiencing these children’s games with dozens of museum-goers—and with my sister, no less—I felt detached from the players, from the activities that helped them bond and allowed them to cope with whatever else they had to confront and struggled to process.

The museum is an authoritative and sterilizing environment.  And even though spaces were set aside at Museum Ludwig for the breaking down of the walls that “look, don’t touch” institutions tend to create for the sake and safety of the exhibited object—which is ultimately deemed more valued than those who, for a price, are entitled temporarily to behold it—the sense of being a passive recipient of activities I associate so strongly with my childhood made me, as a curator of some two dozen exhibitions, aware of the disconnect of which museums are capable even in the act of drawing us in, of creating the impression and thus ticking the boxes of being inclusive.

In the case of Children’s Games, no expensive equipment or extravagant staging is required.  In the public domain, all videos in the series can be watched and downloaded free of charge in a private sphere that is more conducive to bringing back memories stored in personal albums.

Our minds are spaces for the sorting and storing of memories.  Scanning diaries, transcribing personal letters, and showing personal collections of memorabilia, I have long been curating my past and, in projects such as Retroactive Selfies or the forthcoming exhibition Envelope, to communicate what I hope might resonate with others who, like me, have been there.  

Being a person of little consequence—but nonetheless someone in a position to occupy gallery spaces not widely available as curatorial playgrounds to the public—I am especially drawn to what is often deemed trivial and immaterial, objects which I draw upon to question hierarchies, values and conventional thinking about what matters.

Trying to keep my mind open and my imagination elastic, I leap at opportunities to stretch and bridge creatively. I’m game, all right, but it is getting more difficult by the day.