“Young visitors shape the exhibition space”
Childhood learning processes are dependent on specific locations and spaces. They are connected to sensory perceptions and experiences, to one’s own body and to actual settings. How can the KinderKunstLabor build on these ideas and make use of location, space, and architecture in a unique way to enhance access to exhibitions? Children first encounter and experience exhibition spaces in a variety of ways, e.g. while on a school or kindergarten field trip, visiting a café with parents, by chance, etc. The interests and wishes of young visitors and their specific paths—their “paths of desire” or well-trodden paths—can lead to various ways of entering the exhibition.
“The exhibition space becomes a narrative space”
Walls, floors, ceilings, smells, colors, lights, fabrics, sounds, images, and texts: how can children’s perceptual processes be activated in the spaces so that the exhibitions make an impression on children and bring them into dialogue with the work? Various points of connection or individual ways of accessing things should be offered here, utilizing active stimuli, sensory experiences, and creative activities. The emphasis in on how children take in, perceive, and interpret the exhibited works.
This involves developing specific exchange formats and presentational forms for each exhibition that
- offer individual access;
- enable new perspectives and open up new perceptions;
- address current/relevant topics;
- convey experimental and innovative methods;
- generate new knowledge;
- facilitate joint artistic processes;
- promote individual potential and make it visible;
- enable understanding based on one’s own biographies, experiences, realities, and interests;
- not allow for any hierarchization of experiences;
- support individual assimilation of art/design by translating it into one’s own language (snowball: layers of interpretation)
- provide resources for reflection, e.g. through drawing, film, and photo documentation, feedback;
- shape the collaboration via a high level of empathy and,
- allow for great flexibility in how things unfold.
Long-term partnerships with schools, kindergartens, daycare centers, medical and social institutions, and after-school care facilities ensure that, in addition to individual visits, more extensive, longer-term projects are also possible. The Children’s Advisory Board is made up of members from these partnerships.
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