FUNFUN/GUN

During a several-week stay at a holiday resort, I observed children’s military camps where play intersects with militarized rituals, exploring how innocence, discipline, and pop-cultural imagery blur the line between play and normalized violence.

While working on this project during a several-week stay at a holiday resort, I observed children’s military camps as a phenomenon situated at the intersection of play, education, and pop-cultural imaginaries of war, power, and order. During this time, I followed young participants simulating military activities: learning to throw grenades at an “enemy,” carrying out tactical exercises, and moments later playing hide-and-seek or painting camouflage on their faces.

Each day I experienced a strong sense of cognitive dissonance—the lightness of children’s play collided with gestures and rituals that subtly normalize violence, hierarchy, and discipline. This combination of the playful and the frightening, the carefree and the dominant, created an atmosphere that was both absurd and deeply unsettling, reminiscent of aesthetics familiar from films, video games, and popular music. I kept asking myself whether such experiences are truly necessary. Where does preparation end and potential harm begin? Who chooses to send their child to such a place, and why?

Although I view this subject as a universal reflection on contemporary models of upbringing, it carries particular weight for me in the context of the unstable geopolitical situation in this part of Europe.

The photographs presented here are only a fragment of a much larger archive created in an attempt to understand where innocent play ends and something far more serious begins.

A short documentary film is being developed alongside the project and is currently in post-production. (“Gorillaz – Kids With Guns” plays in the background)