Rules of Play feels like a quiet reflection on how we move through life following rules we didn’t write, sometimes together or alone, often without fully understanding why. At first glance, it looks like a game. But the longer you watch, the more it starts to feel like a ritual, full of repetition, small gestures, and symbolic actions that carry weight even if their meaning isn’t obvious.

The piece probes the ambiguity of “play”: a concept often associated with freedom, creativity, and spontaneity. Here, however, play is ritualized. The figures participate in carefully choreographed tasks: they write, balance, merge, perform. There is an air of cooperation, but also of compliance. The silent dialogue — “so,” “okay,” “huh?” — feels less like conversation than a script.

In institutions, relationships, and even leisure, we perform roles within systems we may not have chosen, but have come to accept. The figures’ movements become a metaphor for how social norms, bureaucratic procedures, and digital interfaces guide our actions — gently, invisibly, and completely.

Rules of Play stretch the systems, letting in a bit of breath, of possibility. It isn’t about escape; it’s about noticing. Noticing the patterns we’ve accepted, the games we’re caught in, and the quiet, human gestures that remind us there might still be another way to move through the world.