Twisted pétanque game
La Cour des Grands is a piece of research conducted with Business School Graduates about the gab between institutional communication and actual student experience. The research took place over a series of collective workshops based on image-reading and sharing personal experiences.
Upon concluding the workshops, participants were invited to gather for a game of pétanque. In a playful twist, we played with glass balls instead of the traditional metal ones and replaced the wooden target with a Kinder Surprise chocolate egg. The intention was to create a mind-space where participants had the freedom to manipulate their past experience on a symbolic and metaphorical level. We used the act of play as an attempt to process ambivalent emotions in a collective and a non-intellectual way.
To win a game of pétanque, one can alternate two strategies: to get as close as possible to the target oneself, or to knock away the other player’s ball further away from the target. One is still as far from the target as before, but relatively closer than the other player. The exact the same logic is used to rate Business Schools applicants during entry examinations.
More practically, the glass boules aim to work as transfer objects, into which players could project themselves, as well stress-relief tools, to train ‘‘letting go’’. Substituting the jack (target ball) with a chocolate egg, is another way to express sarcasm as Kinder egg as are literally “empty shells”, similar in their own way to the degree one gets at the end of an overrated education.
After the game, we collaboratively assembled the small plastic toy contained in the egg and shared some chocolate with nearby pigeons.
