Educational workshops for schoolchildren in conjunction with the exhibition “A Beautiful Confluence"
As part of guided visits to A Beautiful Confluence: Josef and Anni Albers and the Latin American World at Mudec, Museo delle Culture, the students engaged in a series of art-making workshops.
Material, that is to say unformed or unshaped matter, is the field where authority blocks independent experimentation less than in many other fields, and for this reason it seems well fitted to become the training ground for invention and free speculation.
—Anni Albers, "Work With Material," 1937
Schoolchildren in Milan lived these words of Anni Albers recently. As part of guided visits to A Beautiful Confluence: Josef and Anni Albers and the Latin American World at Mudec, Museo delle Culture, the students engaged in a series of art-making workshops that explored the qualities of certain materials: paper, jute, and wool, in particular. The workshops were inspired by A Beautiful Confluence, which examines the influence of ancient Latin American art and architecture on the work of Josef and Anni Albers.
"An important thing was to underline the meeting between different cultures united by the same aesthetic vision," said Samuele Boncampagni, a member of Atlante Collective, an Italian cultural organization which designed the workshops.
Led by Elisa Nocentini, an Atlante educator, students compared the uses of line in the Alberses' work and in the Latin American artifacts and weavings which the couple had collected, and which were also on display. They then made a collaborative line drawing, based on those works, with a partner. After looking closely at Anni Albers's weaving Epitaph, the students made "textile drawings" in which they explored the interaction of materials with very different qualities: squares of jute and wool thread. Although the children worked on a small scale, they quickly learned that imagination is the only relevant measurement of a "training ground for invention."
