Ricardo CasesPaloma al aire

The game

This work proposes a study of the game as a symbolic act, a projection, a way to relate to the world. Play, so crucial to childhood, provides a collection of elements that allow people to experiment and practice a life in scale, learning and compiling experiences quickly and safely. However, throughout life we never stop playing and although we believe we are conducting our lives in a practical and objective way, much of our activity is symbolic, metaphorical. The burly men heading out to the fields on Sundays with their pigeons are playing, though they are not aware of it. Through their flying projections they find a location and enhance it. In fact, this mechanism is not too different from the projection of a football fan on his team, but the specific and picturesque aspects of rules and rituals, the elementary and rustic elements of its equipment and the spontaneous organisation expose the mechanisms that move the player. Unlike other more popular sports where the original metaphor (of fights between clans, rites of passage) has been lost in objectification and professionalisation, here the primitive and ritual component is still completely fresh, as if it had just been created. A group of men running round the countryside after their pigeons observing their mating, discussing the rules and refereeing, is reminiscent of the ethnographic documenting of the rites of remote tribes or of a group of children inventing a game while discovering the world.

The anthropological observation of the ritual game, carried out by adults in a developed society, also makes us question the reality of what we are experiencing and our form of symbolic perception. The transformation in the gaze of the players, their regression to their ten-year-old selves, is closely connected to the capacity to experience the symbolic as real, an ability which they have rediscovered.


Luis López Navarro