Once we were kids
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Dates2016 - 2018
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Author
Introduction
Once we were kids
Once we were kids is a work made up of 74 images.
This project comes at a time in which childhood is under constant review. It questions whether it is moving in the right direction, if the education, the habits and routines of today are healthy, or desirable. If the leisure time is enough, if used properly, if the game has the fundamental and relevant role and demanded in this period.
The idea of this series is not to confront, not even to contrast, but to open a space for reflection and dialogue, starting from the imaginary of a child about thirty-five years ago.
Text
“Living impure?
Do not live, son!”
José Martí
Rilke once said that a man's real homeland is the childhood. That one that shapes the one who will later disguise himself as an adult.
The law in the country of childhood is the game. The game, a space of transition that mediates between fantasy and reality. The space, a tool for the imaginary that makes a child world does not have limits.
The images of this project are a product of the memories of that time. The childhood time of a child who grows and makes the game, the passport to any of his worlds.
Once we were kids registers the author's games, still a child. The author gives voice to a past childhood, where everything was fantasy, adventure and sensation of infinite freedom. Where imagination was the best gadget for the ludic manifestation and made nothing seem impossible.
In this series reflects an imaginary world disparate of any current infantile imaginar. A little more than three decades separate both universes. The past one, calm, organic and inexhaustible; nowadays, blurred in virtual worlds, solitary, immediate, saturated and limited.
The fun of a child in his free time, past and now, as analogous as antagonistic.Images that call for uncomfortable confrontations for the digital generations. Childhood, a whole constellation, now reduced to small planets dimensioned from which children are at risk of not even seeing the stars.
Manuela Gressler
