When you look, what do you see?
It might sound like an obvious question. And yet, whenever I start a training course or a research project, I always come back to it: the visual encounter with a material and what it awakens in us. What we are able to see and imagine defines the horizon of possibility: the boundary between matter that is still inert and what it might become.
How do we look at things in our daily lives? Do we greet them with curiosity and ask them questions, or does routine lead us to interact with them in the same predictable way, following fixed purposes? A pen for writing, a pencil for drawing, a fork for eating, an umbrella to keep us dry.
There is nothing wrong with that. But if that’s the only way we see an object, all the rest of its interactive and transformative potential remains out of reach.
Could this habitual way of seeing be why some educators struggle with certain materials?
Trusting children’s creative abilities is not enough. We also need to rely on the generative potential of the materials themselves, to know them deeply, and to be allies, like long-time friends.
For example, what do you see when you look at a sheet of paper?
A material with a specific function, or matter itself?
If your answer is a surface to write or draw on, the sheet will hardly become anything else or spark a creative exploration. And yet, we might feel some relief in adding glue, scissors, markers, words…
We focus too much on adding, when what we really need is to simplify and look more closely.
A sheet of paper.
A leaf.
A button.
A stone.
Each one, a little world.
How can we take off the glasses of habit and open ourselves to a freer, more creative exploration?
By trying to move beyond these first questions that usually arise when we approach a material, such as: How can I use this with children? What could it become? What can I do with it?
In fact, this mindset is only seemingly free, since it is still conditioned by the search for a goal, with the material seen as a means rather than something meaningful in itself.
Instead try asking: Who are you? How can we play together? How can you be transformed?
Even before anything happens, everything has already changed: the object has become a subject that can actively take part. A presence with its own identity.
First of all, its physical presence communicates a color, a shape, a size, a position in space, a weight, a texture, maybe even a smell.
By picking it up, the sheet of paper will invite us to interact through certain actions suggested by its own characteristics, and it will transform accordingly, prompting our response, in an organic, reciprocal process.
Folding, rolling, bending, crumpling, twisting… Soon, the rules of the paper’s “natural grammar” will reveal themselves: the set of limits and potential inherent in its nature, which defines the possible transformations.
Goals, themes, and concepts get in the way. Nothing is right or wrong, because there is no predetermined objective.
Something will happen. But to let it happen, we must first give it space.