Short fictional stories mobilise the material construction of these toyboxes. Like Stone Box, each of the other boxes imagines a scenario they would unravel in the subjectivity of the child at play in a particular spatial or architectural situation. Besides the representation of distant times and inaccessible places, the constellations of objects inside the boxes have the capacity to generate effects that extend beyond their boundaries. They collect things inside as much as they project out meanings. These boxes, their objects and stories, are tangible and intangible articulations of Palestinian collective memory. The child is able to re-order things to construct an identity and a personal relationship with home, family and the collective. Play, in this way, acts as a driver for cultural construction.
One can read the five boxes as a series of little explorations and speculations. Though constructed as toys for children, for adults they trigger reflection. Versions of oneself as a child are recovered with a small-scale, manipulable form of play. The boxes lean towards Barthes’s open-ended type of play — an invitation to read Palestinian history and culture in a simultaneously allegorical, tactile and experimental manner.
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all images Samer Wanan
The constellations of charged boxes and toys create a field that plays out in both directions, from the outside world in and from the inside world of each child, out.
acknowledgements I am grateful to my supervisors Professor Mark Dorrian and Dr. Ana Bonet Miro, as well as to Dr Ella Chmielewska for the fruitful discussions during my PhD journey at the University of Edinburgh. This essay would not have been possible without their invaluable input.
SAMER WANAN is currently undertaking an Architecture by Design PhD at Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, part of Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh. He holds degrees in architecture from Birzeit University and Newcastle University.
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on site review 44 : play
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