Paper Initiation, 2026

Antonina Bormova  

Why do childhood games stay with us long after the toys themselves have disappeared?

In childhood, play becomes the first language through which we begin to understand the world. Imagined stories allow us to step into different roles, reshape the rules, and experience countless possible lives long before they become reality. What appears to an adult as simple make-believe is, for a child, a way of exploring, imagining, and giving form to the world around them.

A paper crown does not need real diamonds. It is made of colored cardboard, ribbons, stickers, and a child's imagination. The very act of creating it becomes a small ritual in which ordinary objects acquire new meaning, and an ordinary room briefly transforms into a kingdom of its own.

Long before we begin building our lives in reality, we rehearse them in imagination. This is where the first stories of courage and fear, friendship and loneliness, triumph and disappointment quietly take shape. They are still fluid, unfinished, and free to change, yet they already become part of the inner landscape we carry into adulthood.

Perhaps every such game is a quiet initiation—one after which the world is never quite the same again.