An Imaginary Playground

The film An Imaginary Playground playfully criticizes the Eindhoven municipality for its approach to creating a playground. Commonly, city playgrounds are designed under administrative guidance, prioritizing safety measures and budgets over the essence of play. This emphasis on safety overshadows the social and cultural significance of play, while also reinforcing bureaucratic processes. Barbara Vignaux invited children to re-enact the process of making the playground. The film highlights the divergence between the instinctive reactions of actual children and how they are represented in the playgrounds’ catalogues. Confronting the seriousness devoted to bureaucratic tasks demonstrates how the infrastructure of play overshadows the activity of play itself.