- Assignment Title: Play pretend.
- Assignment Description: Imagine playing tea-time with a child - you pretend you are drinking tea out of a plastic toy cup but you are not actually drinking, you are you, an adult pretending to drink out of a toy cup. To add a bit more context: for a child 'pretend play' is a form of symbolic play where objects, actions or ideas represent other objects, actions, or ideas. They use their imaginations to assign roles to inanimate objects or people.
- Created by: Roberta Borroni
- Responded by: Yulin Huang, Roberta Borroni, medb, Francesco Felletti, Natasha Brown
Medb - Untitled
Roberta Borroni - Roberta pretending to be a flower
Yulin Huang - TEA TIME WITH A CHILD (FOR THE 39th TIME)
Natasha Brown - The Sun
Francesco Felletti - Consolazione di nome e di fatto
YH: I have been enjoying imagining dialogues/conversations through the medium of automatic writing lately, so this prompt made me want to merge the two, especially as it concerns the innocence of ‘play pretend’ and ‘make believe’ by and with a child. This was a conversation I imagined having whilst imagining myself carrying out the pretend play, with my strawberry milk plushie I keep near my desk, who I see and converse with every so often. I loved drinking lukewarm tea with her on this occasion.
RB: Thinking about playing pretend with a child made me think about how the actions performed during this type of games are not means to an end (if I fake drink from a cup I will still be thirsty). Then I got thinking about the roles that a child may assign to you while playing: you can easily become a character from a book, an object or a creature without the need to dress up - as soon as you are given the character you are that character. On the other hand, I think adults tend to perform this sort of pretend play in a different way, for example when at work you (pretend) play your part to fit your role. In other social settings it might be closer to an attempt to camouflage. Then I saw a field of yellow flowers and decided I wanted to pretend to be a flower, mid-way between the child way and the adult way. When my flower headpiece was ready I went back to the field and it had all been cut down. I was left pretending to fit in a field of wild grass and flowers that didn't look at all like myself as a flower (not that I would have camouflaged with the original field either).
M: I enjoyed the Barbie movie fore what it was but it didn’t have the same emotional impact on me that it seemed to have on many of my friends. I liked it but I found no reason for it to have moved me to tears, and I felt kinda strange about it bc so many people I knew were really affected by it and I thought there must have been something I was missing. When discussing it with Libbi she said that it had made her cry because it had made her miss being a girl, and maybe the reason that it hadn’t had that affect on me was because, “you’ve never lost touch with your girlhood”. Me and my brothers played with our toys and dolls until I was 17 and honestly probably would have for longer if the realities of university and young parenthood and leaving home hadn’t been waiting round the corner for us. Its funny to be 28 now which is the oldest that I’ve ever been and yet feel mentally younger and more free-spirited than I have let myself feel in such a long time. I’ve always collected dolls and bears and other ephemera of my childhood but there has been something special in the past year of finding friends and acquiantances who do the same and support my whims of wonder. Its also been nice for the first time in a long time to be living somewhere without an expiration date, without the anxiety of scraping by financially, where I can put roots down without worrying about having to pack it all up again, and so my collections have really flourished; one in particular being this assortment of Babycham glasses, which is my pride and joy, Babycham being the first alcohol I ever tried when I was 16/17.
NB: I thought about objects that really do seem like they are pretending - like the hearing amplifier I have! It seems completely absurd to turn up a dial to increase the volume at which you hear - as if ears are machines?! Anyway, I then thought about what I would like to have listen to me. And then, how sad it would be to give an object the gift of hearing but nothing else. No voice or ability to move. And how this might change the noise the thing makes. The sun is not very loud, it takes far away scientists to tell us how it sounds. Though, we could pretend the sun could hear us and that we could hear the sun.
FF: When I was little I was a fan of the music from “Aggiungi Un Posto A Tavola” (an Italian musical) and dreamed of being Anastacia or Christina Aguilera. Over time, I didn’t become a pop star, but deep down maybe I am one? (ah ah ah) While I have never played tea time, my play pretend was embodying those songs, in my room, practicing these moves, and imagining myself somewhere else and in another body. I found this assignment particularly beautiful, especially in how it blurs the line between reality and fiction and the idea of a simulation (or simulacra I should say?). When I was thinking about this assignment, I remembered a project I did years ago where I projected childhood videos of myself and my family directly onto me and my family now (like a sort of live table vivant???). While I was doing it I was thinking that it also look a lot like Daria Blum’s video that I really like :-)