IN/OUTDOOR

 CLIENT: Public Nursery School - Caserta, Italy

DABOOOM project

The COVID-19 pandemic is having great impact on humans all over the world, both physically and mentally. Every single person has been affected, especially children, who couldn’t attend classes for almost four months, as schools had to shut down to minimise contagion. At a time when children couldn’t go back to the classroom but were allowed to meet in playgrounds, I was commissioned by a local nursery school to create, together with another artist and friend, a playground game which followed social distancing rules.

We were inspired by the Dada movement - a group of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works. - We saw a parallel with the world COVID-19 had created, as a wide range of nonsensical and irrational behaviours quickly started spreading through society like the virus itself.

We came up with the "DABOOOM project", two playground games to help kids cope and have fun during these challenging times DABOOOM project which is made up of two games, one it is a popular outdoor game which was forgotten from our modern day, it is a revival of an old game called ‘Campana’ in Italian and ‘Hopscotch’ in English, which has unfortunately lost its popularity in recent times. It isn’t clear how the game originated but various versions of it are played all across the globe - for example we have ‘Stapu’ in India and ‘tengteng’ in Malaysia. The other game is called DABOOOM indeed, it is a brand new game we came up with, the rules of this game are developed on emotions following 6 shapes we designed related to emotions and primary and secondary colours. Practically we painted on the ground 6 different shapes each shape has its own color corresponding to an emotion, the rule is to jump on the shape, following its route, which corresponds to the emotion every single kid feel in that moment.

Our message to the world through this project is that humans are made of emotions, and digitalism shouldn’t replace real feelings and human interaction.

CLIENT: W&K Amsterdam