A U T O P L A Y O G R A P H Y
Performing life through play
Play keeps the world larger than culture.
Autoplayography is a practice grounded in the philosophy of play, autoethnography and lived experience.
What happens when you let play seep into the life you are already living?
Autoethnography and the Philosophy of Play
This book is an attempt to bring the philosophy of play developed by Eugen Fink in the 1950s and 1960s into felt experience. In the art world after the Second World War, play became an important force. The Situationists, CoBrA, Fluxus, and other movements expressed ideas of freedom and agency through their art. What happens when freedom is understood not merely as an ideal, but as an element of play?
Fink’s evocative descriptions, however, always remained enclosed within a theoretical framework for me. At the same time, I sensed that his erudite, German-language ontology of play contained a hidden key. My field of research therefore became a field of play. The immanent openness of cycling—every road, after all, embodies freedom of choice 🙂 made a kind of philosophical heist possible.
Play or Read?
If you want to play this book, find it in ‘Ways to Play’. If you want to read, please continue below.
My journey began in the villages of Krombeke and Watou in the Belgian Westhoek. I then extended the playing field to Calpe in Spain, where the phenomenology of play through cycling could reveal itself more clearly. Calpe was followed by Utrecht, where I further developed the practical dimension of the research in Julianapark.
What connected these journeys was, each time, the unique character of the locality. As a result, my research became not only spatial; I could also actually move through it. Each time I situated myself within a landscape, I began to see that it was not simply I who was moving. Play itself was the vehicle through which I moved as a human being.
And however impossibly abstract this may sound—even to me 😉 I gradually began to understand that the “only” thing I had to do was allow myself to be carried by this current of thought. And to practise. Once this shift had taken place, it could no longer be reversed.
The microcosm became the point of departure for a journey into the macrocosm we call life. Through this journey, I came to understand Fink more deeply: the task is not to search inwardly for a hidden self, but to train ourselves in the art of encountering,
Imara Felkers
Summer 2026, Brattfors, Sweden
