What does a village need in order to start playing again?
That was the question that emerged from the Archivo Imperfecto project during the Molino de Saberes citizen laboratory, devoted to traditional games, children’s songs and the oral memory of Sancti-Spíritus. Through conversations with people from the village, names such as Las Primillas, Las Terres and Tibidí appeared, together with memories, local expressions and ways of playing that form part of the municipality’s intangible heritage.
The group identified a shared challenge: if earlier generations barely had the chance to play because of the demands of work, today children encounter new difficulties in doing so. Lack of time, the presence of screens, the disappearance of places to play and restrictions on the use of public space have transformed the way children relate to the village.
In response, the laboratory designed a Cultural Remedy: a Game Itinerary, a route through different places in Sancti-Spíritus where people used to play, inviting those spaces to be brought back to life.
At each stop, a small plaque presents a traditional game with some basic rules and a QR code that lets you listen to the spoken testimony of someone from the village explaining how they remember it. The route is not intended to preserve the games as museum pieces, but to encourage them to be played again, and to invite new people to share their memories, adding their own voices to the collective archive through the SpeakPipe application.
We made the first prototype of a game installed inside the Mill.
