In everyday life, we are surrounded by objects that we know so well that we almost stop really looking at them. An object becomes familiar, loses its ability to surprise us and remains simply what we think it is.
But what would happen if we tried to look at it with different eyes?
From this question, the workshop I created with some middle school classes in Egna, a town in South Tyrol,, was born. During the period when I worked at the school as an Italian substitute teacher, whenever we had some free time, I enjoyed proposing small creative activities to the students. Luckily, my colleagues were also enthusiastic about the materials I prepared and welcomed this activity with pleasure, giving me the opportunity to experiment!
The goal was to explore how objects are perceived and reinterpreted, leaving space for creativity and imagination.
I presented the students with a series of common and random objects, printed on a worksheet, and asked them to cut them out and transform them through drawing. The task was not to represent the object as it is, but to try to see what it could become.
A glove did not have to remain just a glove. It could transform into a character, a fantastic creature, a part of a new body, or something completely different.
Through this simple activity, objects stopped being only functional objects and became starting points for new stories. Their shapes, details and visual characteristics opened up different possibilities, depending on the perspective of the person looking at them.
This workshop connects to my research: if the meaning of objects comes from the encounter between what we see and our experiences, what happens when we leave space for imagination?
In the next blogs, I will collect some of the results that emerged from this experiment and the different interpretations that the students gave to the same objects.
