I was waiting to meet one of the curators of Assemble + Schools of Tomorrow: The Place We Imagine, Lisa Jaques, while perched on a vinyl-covered penguin-like creature, overhearing a beautiful conversation between a little boy and his grandmother.


The boy pointed towards the a slide in the middle of the art gallery, with no more persuasion needed they both headed over.




Upon entering a gallery I am normally aware of a sense of how to behave. A sign says don’t touch, while people whisper while politely observing the art, a frown is thrown at anybody who doesn’t play by the rules. However, this visit was different. I arrived at Nottingham Contemporary ten minutes early to be greeted by smiles and invitation to play.

Play isn’t just for children, it can be enjoyed by everyone and anyone – young to old, shy to confident. It is an essential part of life, an organic and holistic form of connection. The Place We Imagine is a collaboration between the gallery and design collective Assemble, also working closely with resident artists and local schoolchildren, and it allows for exploration and discovery within the gallery space. With play at the heart, there’s intent to contest the boundaries of the gallery walls, opening up a new way of experiencing a museum for both children and adults – and grannies.



In 1968, Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi created an imagined utopian playground as a realm for innocent, autonomous play. Drawn during the Brazilian dictatorship, with the iconic Museum of Art São Paulo (MASP) in the background, her imaginary proposition presents radical ideas through an evocative lens - Bo Bardi’s concept of play could be perceived with a political undercurrent, offering opportunity to rethink the power of young imagination.

Bo Bardi was ahead of her time. Today, her drawing triggers thought-provoking ideas on the way we perceive play, centring art galleries as a potential space to rethink the relationship between playing and learning. Bardi’s drawing makes the viewer interpret the vision through a child’s eyes rather than the architects, with multi-coloured carousel-like flooring and ribbon-like slides – her quote “the young will be the protagonists in the life of the museum through design, music and theatre” informs the Nottingham Contemporary curation.



Turner prize-winning collective Assemble have brought to life the impossible reality of Lina Bo Bardi’s unrealised vision, exploring local children’s actions, ideas, and responses to play through three large-scale interactive sculptures. Two of them –’Big Red’ and ‘Menagerie’ – have been created by Assemble to resemble two of the ideas within Bardi’s drawing.

Big Red, with the red ribbon-like slide, was originally designed to challenge the civic context found at The Brentway, a 2021 Assemble project in Toronto connecting creative practice, public art, and community. The project incorporated outdoor and online elements to rediscover the necessity of play as a tool of post-pandemic urban recovery, and how play can help us better understand our environments and each other through inadvertently shaping public spaces.











Over three years, Nottingham Contemporary’s Schools of Tomorrow programme has supported artists to collaborate with primary schools on craft-led workshops. Together, they have created bespoke, subversive works highlighting ideas of play learnt through conversations and interactions with the children. Jotted phrases from these workshops are written across the walls:



On another wall rules created by artist Charlotte Tupper and children of Edna G Olds Academy are written, with the intent of inviting visitors to reconsider and contest society’s assumed rules.





As an associate artist, Peter Rumney collaborated with Melbury Primary School to develop creative writing from contemporary art, developing literacy skills through playful and creative narratives. “The birds were singing and tweeting at the end.” I found the hidden writing powerfully potent and thought-provoking. “But who scratched the log? Perhaps it was…”.

There is humour in an interactive and subversive work by Sian W Taylor. A film montage capturing precarious footage from a GoPro attached to a toddler’s head, it celebrated inquisitiveness, revealing how toddlers engagement with space through the toddlers’ perspective.

It was evident from my morning amongst these works how the ridiculousness of the environment influenced viewers’ behaviours and body language, and how that was so different to a normal gallery-going atmosphere.  This dynamic environment offered opportunity for discovery, wonder and exploration, and through this a positive perception of the world is created.