Currently: Santa Monica, CA

Introduction: “The theses represented in this exhibition have been guiding principles in a coherent and tranformational history of experien- ce which, already at the time of the first showing of The Hundred Languages of Children exhibition in 1981, characterised experience in Reggio infant-toddler centres and preschools.

These theses are mindful of the many events causing vast transformations in culture and society, in economics and politics, in Reggio Emilia, in Italy, in the world. These theses are sensitive to guidelines in national curriculum. Above all else however, they are capable of guiding our choices for humanity, for liberty, for democracy.”

The exhibition The Wonder of Learning “presents a narrative and communicative structure designed to reflect the contemporaneity, the complexity, and the plurality of points of view that have always characterized the work carried out in the infant-toddler centres and preschools of Reggio Emilia“

Modular Forms by PLAY+SOFT “is a research project on new soft furnishings for young children, resulting in a line of around 200 products. The laboratory process involved the collaboration of twenty-eight international designers, teachers, and pedagogistas: the dialogue between pedagogy and design and the theoretical reflections that were developed.”

THE RIGHT TO GOOD PLAY
Carla Rinaldi – Reggio Children

“Play is a universal phenomenon, present throughout history. It is a shared knowledge, a silent knowledge accessed by children of every epoch and culture with incredible sensitivity, originality, and creativity. It is knowledge that is learned, but not taught. Play and playing, in fact, cannot be taught, just as you cannot tell someone to play. You play or you don’t play, because playing is a way of being in the experience, in reality, in life.
Play has its own intrinsic force and incisiveness, but also the aspects of jocosity and lightness for which it is too often viewed in opposition to learning, to work, to the “serious things that matter.” Yet play gives us a glimpse of ways and styles of being that are alternative to the dominant ones and, by suggesting paths of project design, engages us as individuals and educators.

In fact, if play is a framework within which the events of life can be interpreted, as suggested by Gregory Bateson, then giving quality to play means giving quality to “play-based thinking”; that is, to a way of relating to the world and to life that involves “putting yourself into play”, where imagination, transgression, humor, and irony become strategies of everyday life. For this reason, in order to construct welcoming contexts for play, we must make available times, spaces, furnishings, materials, and toys that lend themselves to play, that lend themselves to being used and transformed within the play.

Objects offered in their flexible identities, open to receiving the actions, thoughts, desires, and learning of children and adults who know how to “stay in the game.” But at the same time, objects (furnishings, materials, toys) that, thanks to their colors, shapes, and materials, are able to suggest possibilities, ideas, and emotions that enrich the projects of play, learning, and life of the children and adults alike.”