It springs to mind that children constitute the most fragile but at the same time most apparently privileged social class today. Having free time on one´s hands can represent, for childhood, the highest challenge. Because childhood divides time into free time and obligations. What has to be done is decided by the adults, and all the rest is devoted to play.
Indeed, Play-use contrasted the idea of functionality – resolving a practical
problem with the minimum expenditure of energy – and the idea of play, an
activity, which has no other objective than the activity itself and the pleasure
to which it gives rise. The past century enshrined human efficiency as a duty:
functionality, taking profit in the least time possible. In parallel we can speak
of a hyper-aestheticized society, where everything tends towards beauty or
seductiveness. But the construction of identity in childhood, the perception
of the world surrounding the child, can also be considered as a battlefield
where desire runs continually up against the lack of control over the
environment, where human relations are not ergonomic and where industrial
production does not follow the same logic as in the adult world.
we hope will give the public a cultural context and entry point into Friedl's work.
