Landscapes of Childhood

a space for play, learning and connection 

play is sacred

Play is a way of learning and relating rather than mere entertainment. That’s where a child discovers and strengthens their unique ways of being in the world. It’s where the different inner characters get their own voice, and can unite in the act of play.

Paraphrasing a pedagogue and philosopher Friedrich Froebel, play is the highest stage of the child's development, the purest and most spiritual expression of the inner, secret, natural life, a state that brings forth joy, freedom, satisfaction, repose within and without, peace with the world.

Nurturing the playful spirit is as important as noticing and respecting personal rhythms, autonomy, needs and imagination. In this space child’s sensitivity towards themselves and all beings grows. Landscapes of childhood tries to respond to that as a spatial practice.

a constellation of micro-worlds

Landscapes of Childhood offers a constellation of micro-worlds, an ecology of spaces, invitations, states, rhythms, and possibilities, shaped by human imagination and intervention as much as by natural processes.

Rooted within the lived methodology of Foresta Kids, Landscapes of Childhood offers both guided learning formats (as a continuation of our School without Walls), as well as multiple possibilities for open free play, where the space itself, the built elements and the land become collaborators. Where space is not only about offering variety of affordances for children, but also a space that actively cares for every child that enters it.

In this context landscapes touch on multiple layers: physical landscapes, emotional landscapes, imaginative landscapes, social landscapes, sensory landscapes, inner landscapes, ecological landscapes.

Children naturally move between different energetic states throughout the day, and may need support from the space itself to respond to their needs. At different times it may be: intense movement, solitary retreat, symbolic play, experimentation, observation, togetherness, boredom, repetition, chaos, storytelling, construction, destruction, recomposition, rest. We find it important not to flatten these needs and rhythms, not to manipulate a child into a constant activation only of certain qualities but to acknowledge and support rhythms, transitions, and plurality. Therefore the project offers a spatial constellation of distinct but interconnected micro-worlds, each responding to a specific need.

pathways of learning

Having been involved with children educational realms for the past 10 years, our criticism to a traditional understanding of what children's learning is has been mainly about a refusal of several dominant assumptions and pedagogical paradigms, such as overstimulation, rigid educationalism, encouragement of passive consumption or repetition, adult functionalism, instruction-oriented approach, hyper-monitoring, sedentary attention, fragmenting concentration, disembodied cognition, risk deprivation, and constant performance and achievement orientation.

Throughout the years of leading Foresta Kids studio in Berlin we have felt that true learning emerges through encounter, experimentation, relation, personal and collective discernment, and that slowness, attentiveness, co-creation, respect of rhythms, as well as an ability to hold space for challenge and chaos, are of great value.

So it is our wish that the approach to learning that Foresta Kids have been developing as life-centered, relation-oriented, not optimizing the child, but widening the world, not separated from ecologies but inviting landscape itself to become a pedagogical partner, that this approach extends into the physical space of Landscapes of Childhood.

an invitation into world-making

Childhood needs to be held in poetic, relational, sensory, ecologically vibrant and alive spaces, in terms of both tangible physical environments as well as invisible philosophical ideas, in whose gentle arms pedagogical paradigms become material cultures. Landscapes of Childhood explores how spaces for children might become ecologies of imagination and experimentation, attentive freedom and contemplation, discovery and encounter — inviting children not only to play and learn, but to inhabit and co-create worlds.

Isamu Noguchi spoke about seeking “to bring sculpture into a more direct involvement with the common experience of living,” by building interactive sculptures as well as integrated playscapes of sculpted earth. “For me,” Noguchi explained, “playgrounds are a way of creating the world.” 

material gestures

Landscapes of Childhood are situated within a living ecology of a forest garden. It is important to us thhat children do not only “learn about ecology”, they temporarily inhabit ecological space and time. It is also important that material practices involved into composing and constructing this space suggest ways in which human-planetary relations can be rearticulated and make real efforts to build its components in attentive coherence with and within living ecologies, so that this material project itself becomes a project of connection.

Beside the impact this has on multispecies relations, we believe the kinds of materials that children will be in touch with day in and day out, the forms and shapes they will be seeing and relating to, the atmospheres those bring are of crucial importance, as those will also affect children’s aesthetic taste, sense of beauty, psychic development, and largely influence their worldviews. 

summary

Landscapes of Childhood contains spatial, artistic and pedagogical research into childhood, play and landscape within Foresta.