The pleasure of drawing

Drawing was ousted from secondary education during the twentieth century and was often considered to be a mere recreational and pastime activity. Today, more than ever, it must be essentially recognized (and at times reintroduced), even in secondary schools, as a cognitive tool and communicative ecosystem through which to bring about a radical change in educational and cultural processes.

The aim of the research was to promote the role of graphic language in the learning processes of children.

This exhibition offers us an opportunity to observe and interpret the many processes and clever strategies that children and young people use to build their graphics.

The drawings on display are just a few testimonies which are not intended to be exhaustive, but aim to recount some of the multiple ways of learning the graphic language.

An evolution that, as is the case with all learning processes, has steps forward, steps backward, advances and pauses, which mutually nurture one and other in the encounters and exchanges with our surroundings and with others. Learning is not a linear process but a journey that, when consciously supported, is rich in experimentation, cognitive and imaginative discoveries.

IN DEPTH ANALYSIS

Human beings have made marks since their very beginnings, it reveals the desire to leave a mark of oneself in the world in order to assert one’s presence, to communicate, to narrate.

At first, they are gestures in the air, body postures, voice scribbles, then gradually the mark turns into a drawing and becomes a representation of what we see and imagine around us, thanks to the complex and essential relationship between mind, eye, and hand.

 Sometimes it is the idea that gives shape to the mark, sometimes it is the lines drawn which suggest a new thought. Through drawing, children also build “theories” about their surroundings: often the sketches and drawings precede their arguments and hypotheses and support the process of understanding reality.

Thoughts and marks feed each other endlessly, in an interchangeable and unique relationship.

"So, what are the pleasures that make up the act of drawing?
There is a playful pleasure of which we must not lose sight,
there is a pleasure of fabulation which is extraordinary,
there is a pleasure of movement,
there is a visual pleasure – there cannot be a pleasure
which does not involve the eye,
there is a rhythmic-temporal pleasure,
there is a spatial pleasure,
there is a self-identifying pleasure, that is a pleasure of assigning an identity to something,
there is a repetitive pleasure,
there is a cognitive pleasure
and there is also a pleasure of learning.
Another pleasure is the relational one, that of being able to communicate.
There is an aesthetic pleasure, which is inextricably intertwined
with the symbolic aspect; the symbolic pleasure is another of the pleasures
with which we can conclude this list of pleasures."

Loris Malaguzzi