IS EVERYTHING A GAME?

The Game, 2015 / Bergamo, Italy

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​I may not have many photographs of children, but a few hold a special place in my heart.​ This particular one captures children playing tag beneath the columns of a portico in Città Alta, Bergamo. In Italy, it is still possible to travel back in time, despite the fragments and distractions of the present. ​Making me think how beautiful it is to journey into the past without being forced to remain there. You can visit it briefly and then return to the thick stew of the present. My thoughts pause on the children as vessels of time. Up to a certain age, they have no real sense of the past. At least, I don’t recall having one myself. Living entirely in the "now," they inhabit the past of other children​ - those who have grown up or vanished over time​ - children who were once just like them. Perhaps this is why we care for them and love them so devotedly; each child carries a part of our past. I want to believe it is not only so that someone will remember us, but so that we might return, even if briefly, to what we once were. To that skin that no longer fits us.​ To not lose the child we were.​ 
As I observe this image for some time, a ​few questions arise in me: Is everything a game? Who is truly playing with “past and present”? Is it the mind, the divine, or Zhuang Zhou, who wonders whether he dreams he is a butterfly or if the butterfly dreams it is Zhuang Zhou? Am I one of those children? Are they just a dream, or merely a captured pictorial archetype, locked into a few thousand pixels?

​July 2025, Sofia