CHILDREN OF THE WORLD
In 2001, the Children of the World were installed in the Parc de Bercy, 21 bronze pieces to mark the entry into the 21st century.
Another series presented at Art Fair Abu Dhabi was acquired by the Prince of Abu Dhabi in 2009.
In 2010, as part of the Universal Exhibition in Shanghai, the 21 children of the world were permanently installed in Pudong on the banks of the Huangpu River.
Individual sculptures have been transferred to the city where the casts that shaped them came from. To date, sculptures can be found in Monaco, Cuernavaca in Mexico, Andorra, Siena in Italy, Marrakech in Morocco, Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso and Shanghai in China.
"Children of the World" is one of Rachid Khimoune's major works. These monumental bronzes of children from all continents are adorned with modern roots that are the imprints of urban soils, manhole covers, of all the capitals where Rachid Khimoune "met his children".
It was while watching his daughter and her little friends form a farandole in the playground of the nursery school that Rachid Khimoune was inspired by Enfants du Monde. It was the early 1980s. The artist traveled to several large cities to collect “the skin of the streets”.
As he explains in the book dedicated to him, “all the asphalts look the same, yet the manhole covers and tree grates are distinguished from one city to another like a tattoo on the skin.” “These signs even reveal the identity of the city… I would have cast the words: Water – Sanitation – Gas – Electricity in all the languages of the world.”
In searching for the original traces of peoples, Rachid Khimoune traveled the cities of the world, molding paving stones, manhole covers, fractured bitumen, what he calls “his extraterrestrials” – because they are extracted from the ground – to then dress his characters, like a “couturier”.
“Children have always been involved in the process of making the casts. In the street, for the location scouting or the installation of the elastomer on the manhole covers, these first curious people never hesitated to get involved with me in this manufacturing process. Without any referential discourse, they spontaneously understand that such a plate will become a belly, that another will be a face and that these extracts from the ground will become a Child of the World character.”
