VORREMMO INCONTRARTI :)

(WOULD MEET YOU)

The project IncontrArti is an educational project about interculturality. Its aim is to favour integration among children coming from different cultures, through art potentialities.

Our aim is to stimulate children to seek channels of communication and confrontation different from verbal language, in order to go beyond the linguistic boundaries and to find an universal language. For this reason we believe in the great value of images and of visual language which, even if influenced by a particular culture, are naturally free from every system of symbols or alphabets elaborated by human beings. It is possible to communicate by images, but even by gestures, by movements, by sounds and silences. Isn’t that what we call multimedia?

Le forchette di Munari.
Bruno Munari, 1991.

This alternative communication is combined with a deep rediscovery of our way to perceive reality, based not only on the primacy of sight but also on the use of hands, ears, nose, mouth and above all, the heart. We love and encourage the so called synaesthesia, i.e. the union of perceptions, emotions, and information coming from different senses which increase our knowledge of the world and our aliveness.

We try to focus on what is already part of ourselves: creativity, that many deny to possess, is actually an innate mental faculty that helps us to organize information.

With our proposals we want to remove some dust from those rusty mechanisms and give them a new life, in order to learn how to see the reality from a new point of view, like when we were children, to interpret and to assign meaning beyond preconceived knowledge, to think in a lateral and divergent way. If we think laterally, we will notice that there are new, original and more efficient ways to face everyday problems.

Then, the different will not be seen with distrust and prejudice, but as an holder of huge and unlimited experiences, knowledge, stimuli and curiosities.

Bull's Head.
Picasso, 1942.

FOR WHO

For now, we address children of all ages, from 3 years old to 10 years old, elaborating different paths depending on age range.

Potentially, the project could be extended and everyone could be involved!

WHAT

We propose activities that will stimulate reflections about cross-cultural themes - e.g. identity, places, emotion’s colors, handcraft objects - through the presentation of relating materials of different nature: books, comic books, leporellos, maps, images, painting, artworks, music, cinema, photos. This is due to our will to favour a multi-medial approach.

We settle an artistic laboratory for each meeting, where children can mould and give colors and expression to their impressions and elaborate effectively their ideas.

Children at work in Tirano, Public Library
"Paolo e Paola Maria Arcari".

HOW

We strongly believe in the value of rules because, as Bruno Munari said:

«Rule alone is monotonous. The combination between rule and chance is life, 

art, fantasy, equilibrium».

Therefore, each activity is accurately organized, both in the directives, in materials and practical support, but every child can express themselves freely. There are no models to be copied nor example of perfection to be followed: rule is necessary only to provide directions to be followed in order to optimize results, because “projecting is easy when you know how to do that”.

Only through direct and active experimentation children can become actual protagonists of their learning process. “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand”, Confucius said. But this making-process has to completely useless and free from every utilitarian ambition typical of Western society. For us  it is important that the child takes posses of this learning process in order to apply it in other different situations: their inheritance will be not a product, but a behave.

WHERE

Potentially, everywhere: in a classroom, in the hall of a museum or a library, in a field or in a backyard.

The important thing is that there must be a great open space where it will be possible to sit all together,  sharing, listening to other people and paying attention to our interiority.

For the laboratorial activity it is important that all the materials are tidy, in order to put the children in the condition to choose with awareness what they desire and to distinguish the specificity of every support.

But don’t worry: we will help you sort out your mess!

WHY

We already presented some aims of our project, but in particular we want to increase, enhance and valorize knowledge: our project has an intercultural target and we believe in the equality and in the richness of every culture. We fight against prejudices and narrow mindset with the proposal to draw knowledge, curiosities, beliefs and tales from every culture and to share them. Only experimenting actively the diversity we can become aware of the big source it represents and employ it in everyday life.

Respect, listening, sharing are the key principles.

 BENEFITS

• To promote peer to peer collaboration and joint commitment.
• To share experience, knowledge, back-ground.
• To experiment varieties of different materials and supports.
• To sensitize to a multimedia and synaesthetic approach to the reality.
• To provide stimuli, proposals and new cognizances.
• To stimulate a different, divergent and lateral way to look at the reality.
• To valorize everyone’s creative and artistic potential.

INSPIRATIONAL FIGURE

The inspirational figure of this project is Bruno Munari, architect, designer, graphic, writer but most of all polyhedral artist and pedagogue by chance. He was the first who strongly believed in the educative value of art and who projected the laboratories from which we take inspiration.

Bruno Munari, 1907-1998.

But if it is true that “everyone knows a different Bruno Munari”, we especially know the Munari of unlimited and free experimentation and of the variations. For him, the “sincere research of variations” was one of the several faces of creativity which consists on systematically changing the features that normally define an object and on proposing a new version of it, different but still recognizable. Like human faces, all different but still faces of human beings!

To search, create, elaborate varieties, therefore, to make the difference our richness.

Alla Faccia!
Bruno Munari, 1992.

WHAT WE HAVE DONE UNTIL NOW

A first set of laboratories took place in Tirano last spring, at the public library “Paolo e Paola Maria Arcari”. The Participants were 15 children – foreigners and Italians – between 8 and 10 years.

The project has been presented in occasion of the 10th UNESCO Summer School “Childhood and children in Multicultural societies: theory, praxis,research” in Warsaw, at the Accademy of Special Education. Our research is going to be published in the conference proceedings

Morover, IncontrArti has been part of the 15 educative tools presented at the Tool Fair Italia 2016,
an exposition of innovative educative practices in Rome. Valued as one of the best tools, it is in the TOP 5 Tool of the Italian Tool Fair.

In the light of the former goal, IncontrArti will be presented in occasion of the International Tool Fair in Malta, from 7th to 12th of November.

IncontrArti is even registered in the Educational Toolboox of Erasmus+ Educative Portal.
Find it here: IncontrArti

For the future, we are waiting for you and we would like to meet you!

Contact us through our Facebook Page: LoT - Larcenies of Time.