PLAY is a headstrong city festival that will take over the centre of Kortrijk with contemporary artworks. You can immerse yourself in the unique world of national and international visual art at diverse indoor and outdoor locations in the city.

MAP13 presents the project Brick Play, a participatory process in the city of Kortrijk, with the construction of a tile vault as its intent. Map13 Barcelona organised and directed several workshops where citizens were able to discuss the neighbourhood, the city, the form and location of the vault and their wishes and needs. MAP13 is a collective of architects based in Barcelona, Spain, formed by Marta Domènech Rodríguez, David López López and Mariana Palumbo Fernández

For PLAY Kortrijk, Tere Recarens  (Arbucies Catalonia 1967) plans to create new ‘hopscotch games’ in different locations in the city of Kortrijk. She has investigated the cultural differences in all kinds of ‘hopscotch games’, in which players toss a small object into numbered triangles or squares, that form an outlined pattern on the ground and then hop or jump through the open spaces to retrieve the object. She discovered that these hopscotch games exist everywhere in the world and that they are all quite similar. This game can be found in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. The artist aims to use the stones and the streets of Kortrijk to create new and surprising versions of ‘hopscotch’, inviting children and adults to play.

Anna Marín (Figueres 1965) presents “Track 17 – World on a string.” The sculpture consists of oak wooden structures with tensed strings in its interior, placed strategically in the transit zone of the space. They resemble two doors and a window. For the artist, the doors are a metaphor for the ongoing international immigration in Europe, especially in the Mediterranean area, and the strings, frontiers and barriers for prohibiting trespass. The installation invites the public, young and old, to interact with these unusual ‘instruments’ and to discover the sounds they make. Playing with the strings, for example, will produce a ‘melancholic’ sound.

The doors of the installation are a reference to the doors of Europe and will invite reflection on diversity through distant unfamiliar sounds as well as recognisable sounds. The sounds that remind us of the title of the piece, World on the string, carry a clear message about the grave situation of the refugees who are waiting at and attempting to cross the borders of Europe, in search of a better future. (Play press-release)