Imaginative Object and Mimetic Object

The mimetic and imaginative dimension of the object defines the very essence of objects and their use. Their interaction is seen in an exemplary way in that specific object with which every human being begins their relationship with reality: the toy. The aesthetics of the toy thus makes it possible to ascertain how mimesis and imagination cooperate and/or conflate in the constitution of the object. To investigate this dialectic, the essay examines Alma Siedhoff-Buscher’s toy Bauspiel: Ein Schiff in which imagination becomes the center of the child’s user experience. Leaning on a number of theoretical considerations on the toy, from Plato to Benjamin, the essay seeks to emphasize the aesthetics of toy as a space of creative freedom even in its opposition to the mimetic declination of the object understood as the adult’s ideological interference in the child’s world. Imagination, expressed in play, thus becomes the configuration of a possible world that, in Siedhoff-Buscher’s perspective, the mimetic object would seem, on the contrary, to deny.