Baby Group (2024)

Baby Group is a film and research project exploring early childhood development, collective learning, and the role of affect in education. The project draws on historical and contemporary theories of pedagogy—particularly those influenced by Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who emphasized the social nature of learning—as well as Almborg’s observation that studies of early childhood development often presuppose the presence of the mother, rather than investigating babies’ senses of themselves. Almborg’s film documents a series of experiments the artist conducted over several months with a group of six-month-to-one-year-old children in London to investigate how infants interact, communicate, and form relationships before acquiring language. Baby Group is an insightful exploration of early socialization that proposes that the basis of complex social interactions, and perhaps civilization itself, is present in the earliest stages of development. - Amant