Childhood Games emerges between impulse and reflection, drawing from childhood gestures to examine how technology shapes desire, mirrors, and modes of existence.

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Fun & games (2025) is where the series began: a pop explosion standing at the threshold between Kitsch Glitz and Childhood Games. Vintage cartoons from the 1970s painted in acrylic and resin on wood, and the screen the artist's children played with during their childhood. The first work to explore openly the passage between the physical and the digital.

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From there, New Religion (2025) arrived: repurposed mobile phone screens alongside pasta, a security camera, and resin, investigating the perfect imperfection of social media influencers. The screen as altar. The feed as ritual.

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Social fabric (2025) followed, extending the research to scale and to darkness: 624 discarded cellphone screens held together by neodymium magnets, two metres by two metres. The work explores the dark ecosystems we visit through mobile phone screens, surfaces that function simultaneously as mirrors of our real reflection and portals to the digital world.

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In Kite I (2025), screens become mirrors: smooth surfaces where the body recognises itself. Play becomes perception. In Kite II (2025), the mirror fractures; cracked screens return a divided image, a body split between the tangible and the virtual. The glow of technology exposes what it conceals, the seduction and the violence of what we discard.

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Hide-and-seek (2025), Domino geim (2025) and Puzzle (2025) explore the encounter between physical and digital, the phygital. The research unfolds into echo cameras and the idea of digital bubbles, where everything returned is a reflection of one's own gaze. The navel appears as a symbol of origin and excess, marking the tension between presence and disappearance. The game extends beyond the visual, revealing how much we show and how deeply screens permeate our being.

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In Chess between colonies (2025), an installation, all pieces are black, shifting the game from competition to encounter. Each carries half a symbol that only completes itself in relation. The board merges gold and oil, materials that drive the digital world, invoking value and extraction. The contemporary colonial game plays out not on land, but through data, behavior, and attention.

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The Doll House (2026) is where the series arrives at its fullest form. A transparent polycarbonate structure built by hand, three floors, open front facade: a house that conceals nothing. Its inhabitants are repurposed mobile phone screens, seated on 3D printed furniture, gathered at the table, lying in beds. The screens are the dolls of our contemporary world, the surfaces we perform for, disappear into, shape ourselves to be seen by. Beside the structure, a manuscript, printed on letter paper and simply stapled. A sign: Please take one. The house stays. The text travels home with whoever takes it. Object, inhabitants, and manuscript: three elements, one question.

 

Between mirror and play, Childhood Games transforms childhood into inquiry, an invitation to look, to question, and to resist. Consciousness becomes a form of resistance. 

 

Childhood Games gives form to and extends the Communication dimension of the ACT practice, the artistic research framework developed by Paula Marcondes over thirty years.