In the ambient of the On Mobilisation International Symposium, the School of Wish students Beatrice Sunny Brero, Tommaso Giachino, Elisabetta Lava, Alice Mariotti, Gabriele Totaro and Alessandra Vaccina celebrated the end of the Forever Young project. On this path, they were guided by the artists Francesca Cinalli, Paolo De Santis, Fabio Castello and Valentina Roselli to build an imaginary school based on their likes and desires. During the festivity, the teenagers took the adults back to school where they proposed an alternative lesson plan: a class that immersed the public in play and imagination by tasking them to build ephemeral and soft landscapes, while another one opened them to an experience of tremble and vulnerability when dividing the audience into pairs to exercise losing themselves in each other’s eyes.
The poetic diagram above centers on materials from the second class. It has assembled the expectations and outcomes that were written by the audience before and after steeping in profound eye contact with their partners. With the expectations and outcomes facing each other on the paper as the adults faced each other during the exercise, the focus of the diagram intensifies on what unfolds in the middle, when after a few nervous smiles the partners relaxed into a shared experience, when embarrassment transformed into a sense of calm and discovery. The diagram can be read from left to right, right to left, diagonally, from down to up or the other way around, allowing the gaze to take a walk, similar to how the students made the drawings used here to emphasize the in-between space of two bodies: by practising walking on paper.
How could the transformation of vulnerability into bravery inspire an educational paradigm?
What do the needs that were made visible by the students’ imaginary lesson plan say about the current, normative school system?
How to cultivate trust instead of self-awareness in a classroom?
Expectations and outcomes written by the School of Wish audience on the 31st of May, drawings made by the School of Wish students during the workshops, data collected and arranged into a diagram by Kadri Sirel.