Piece Becoming

Juguetoría is a toy workshop that is partly real and partly imaginary, where toys are designed and built through play. As part of the Art and Penitentiary Centers project by Festival elPetit and laSala, Juguetoría set up its small play-piece workshop for eight days together with incarcerated participants.

The process began with participants' childhood memories, their memories and wishes of playing with their families, collective challenges, shared games, and the processes, techniques and materials of product design. From this starting point, nine play environments, six families of play objects and countless ways of playing—some already experienced, others still to come—were co-created.

These encounters gave rise to pathways and wheeled toys, containers, tools and mechanisms for fishing objects, games involving letters, words and clouds, collections of challenges designed to encourage shared play, boards and grids inspired by random arrangements of everyday objects, board game boards and geometric templates.

The construction drawings, models and prototypes created during the workshops are now being digitised so they can be produced using the workshop's digital fabrication tools, becoming part of a collective installation that brings together these ideas for play into open-ended environments and play objects that will continue to invite exploration and play.

Becoming Piece gives the installation its name by celebrating the process of transforming ideas, actions, decisions and materials into elements and spaces that remain open to play, participation and ongoing transformation.

Artistic team

Artistic and community co-creation promoted by laSala i elPetit, designed by Juguetoría.