Re-Play: A Project About the Innocence of Childhood

With Re-Play, East Belgian photographer Christian Roosen presents a photographic series that explores childhood memories and their significance for adult identity.

Developed over many years, the project places people from a wide range of social and professional backgrounds in an unexpected situation: at their workplace, they take off their shoes, sit down on the floor and engage with a toy from their own childhood. What initially appears to be a simple act of play becomes, in his photographs, a deliberate interruption of professional and social conventions.

The familiar toys function as personal objects of memory. They open up a space between past and present, between the public role of an adult and the private memory of an earlier stage of life. In the photographic staging, these different identities meet and become visible simultaneously.

Re-Play is less concerned with an idealised notion of childhood than with the emotional power that memories of this period can retain into adulthood. The photographs reveal how closely personal history, objects and identity are intertwined. At the same time, they create a moment of disorientation: people we know through their professional roles suddenly appear in an unfamiliar, playful and more vulnerable position.

The exhibition opens on 27 September. The opening speech will be given by Isabelle Weykmans.