2024 10th iSTART Children's Art Festival-Panda Thousand Bridge Project
Children from Sichuan Panda Nature Reserve brought their worries and thoughts about panda habitat, and together with the little curator, they created a carousel panda device, full of children's interest!
2024 10th iSTART Children's Art Festival-Grass and Dragon
One is a grass dragon woven by Grandpa Ye from Zigong, and the other is a retired engineer from the community who assembled the environmental dragon with children using plastic bottles as materials. "Plan T" has more than 100 teachers involved. From the beginning, rural teachers didn't have the courage to participate in the exhibition of the art museum, to today, they think that the field of the art museum may not be enough to express. We can see the state of city and village being empowered and intertwined with each other. Following the images taken by the rural children, the handmade books made, the search for powerful ta or the village walking plan initiated by the children will enable us to step into the inner world of the rural children and truly feel their vitality of free creation under the scenery of nature, countryside and heaven and earth.
2023 9th iSTART Children's Art Festival-Ant Paradise
Ant Paradise is a continuous research project in the small curator project. Huang Yiyi, the small curator, has arranged hundreds of specimen test tubes in the exhibition hall, which is only the tip of the iceberg. On the display table were dozens of animal knowledge books, which were bought by father Huang Lin for his son. Initially, ants were only a childhood interest, and under the impetus of the iSTART project, the shallow interest developed into a hobby for more in-depth research. To Huang Lin's surprise, his curiosity and love for ants formed a self-driving force, which made Yiyi learn relevant knowledge almost crazy. I read literature without sleep and food, join the national ant circle, purchase materials to make ant nests, raise ants, and go wild to various places. He followed the method provided by "Ant World" and wrote a research report called "The Wonderful World of Ants. In the future, Yiyi hopes to continue to study insects and become a naturalist.
2024 10th iSTART Children's Art Festival-Children's Theatre
Zhou Zhou, a teacher from Southwest University for Nationalities, has been paying close attention to children's animation for a long time. Children's own animation and animation suitable for children's viewing made by college students are gathered in this exhibition. During the tour, teacher Zhou Zhou introduced to us, "some children, from composition to mirror division, to manual design, and then to animation production, this series of workshops on children's cognitive animation are actually more interactive with children from the perspective of multiple intelligences.
2024 10th iSTART Children's Art Festival-Gaga Country
This year is the seventh year of Gaga State in iSTART. Since 2014, three children founded "Gaga State". This country accommodates more and more Gaga people. This year, the story of Gaga State is about what happened on the earth-some survivors came to the earth after the collapse of Gaga State and gradually integrated into the life on the earth. After a period of time has passed, the younger generation of Gaga has forgotten their identity. A descendant of Gaga State accidentally discovered his identity and began his journey on Earth to find his way home.
2024 10th iSTART Children's Art Festival-Start Designing C²
At the beginning of the design, C participated in a number of child-friendly space design projects. The 10th iSTART Children's Art Festival is the third child-friendly exhibition space design jointly created with A4 Art Museum (A4 Children's Art Museum). We have opened a children's model workshop in the design, allowing children to make models like architects, perceive the space, explore the interest of the space with children, and explore the "old change" plan of sustainable design for children's space.
2024 10th iSTART Opening Ceremony
At the beginning of the design, C participated in a number of child-friendly space design projects. The 10th iSTART Children's Art Festival is the third child-friendly exhibition space design jointly created with A4 Art Museum (A4 Children's Art Museum).
The 10th iSTART Children's Art Festival in 2024 is the beginning of the design of a child-friendly exhibition space created by C and A4 Art Museum (A4 Children's Art Museum) for the third time.
With the theme of "Small Nature, Big Family", the 10th iSTART Children's Art Festival will join hands with a co-creation team of more than 9000 people to focus the exhibition on the fields of art education, public welfare action, psychological healing, co-creation games and so on, and discuss with scholars, teachers and artists from all walks of life children's natural experience and the necessity of growing up in a supportive social environment, it is hoped that by reactivating and connecting the elements of "small nature" and "big family", children will be supported to grow up in a more natural and supportive environment.
The 10th iSTART Children's Art Festival is also a review of the 10th anniversary of iSTART. The exhibition starts from the iSTART10 anniversary document wall. Each time slice selected here has fixed the growth thread of iSTART, from art classes for children after Wenchuan earthquake to planning exhibitions for rural, special children and urban children. From the early days when more artists led the exhibition to now when children become the main body of creation, gradually constructed from the perspective of children, multi-expression of small ecology. The experiences of countless living individuals-children, artists, teachers, co-creators, team staff-have woven the course of this decade.
The 10th iSTART Children's Art Festival also invited many long-term children's co-creation projects to return: Gaga Country's seventh year in iSTART; Huang Yiyi, a small curator who participated in iSTART twice, and his ant paradise; For three consecutive years of co-creation project toy factory; Continue to pay attention to the T project of rural aesthetic education, as well as the family art museum plan, etc. Year after year, each project of iSTART has become more and more beautiful like a gem polished and carved countless times, but perhaps the best way to understand it is to return to the state of a stone, just like the main vision of the iSTART10 anniversary, with 10 stones of different sizes and crookedly overlapping each other.
ISTART Children's Art Festival is an important annual project of A4 Art Museum (A4 Children's Art Museum). It was initiated by A4 Art Museum in 2014 and has been successfully held for 10 sessions so far. Its core is to create and build a creative and diverse beautiful world with children from the perspective of children. Every year, iSTART cooperates with a wide range of schools, families, communities, and public welfare action partners to build a sustainable art education ecological network. So far, it has covered 34 cities in 23 provinces in 7 countries around the world, and has cooperated with more than 24000 small artists. In cooperation with more than 1000 educational practitioners, artists, experts, scholars and cross-disciplinary workers around the world, we have developed hundreds of participatory art education projects, transforming the public from participants in art museums to creators. iSTART insists on multi-dimensional art projects and inquiry mode, so that art can really have a positive impact on children's future, connect children with the real world with art, and provide children with a broad soil for social learning and growth.
At the beginning of the design, C participated in a number of child-friendly space design projects. The 10th iSTART Children's Art Festival is the third child-friendly exhibition space design jointly created with A4 Art Museum (A4 Children's Art Museum). We think that the exhibition is small, but in every space design, we try to bring forth the new, explore new exhibition experience, and integrate into a richer way of participation and interaction. Let the exhibition space is not only an exhibition for the viewer to "see", but also a diversified way of experience.
When the theme of the 10th iSTART was announced as "small nature, big family", we thought of an unknown Finnish architect, Alva Aalto. Perhaps the reason why he is not as famous as other modernist masters is precisely because his works are small, introverted and furniture-shaped, like his most personal glass vase, like the utensil polished out of nature: Aalto Vase. Among his many "small and beautiful" designs, he extracted the humanistic and naturalistic design language from Northern Europe. This design language emphasizes natural curves, natural materials and low saturation colors. If we put Aalto's naturalistic design concept in the contemporary design context, it is actually consistent with sustainable design thinking, and it is also in the same line. Therefore, we also hope to incorporate more natural curves, natural materials and fewer colors in the 10th iSTART, and reduce the waste of previous exhibition space, and try to explore sustainable exhibition methods.
In the design of the exhibition hall, we try to implant the exhibition forms of different unit themes of iSTART on the basis of retaining more of the original exhibition space as much as possible. At the same time, we also regard the original exhibition structure as a new creative inspiration, and explore the interest in space and the inheritance in time and space in a way of "old building transformation. In the end, we hope to reduce the consumption of funds and materials for the construction of the exhibition, and focus more on the presentation of the exhibition works themselves. We also jokingly call this an iSTART "old change project" and an attempt at sustainable design.
We really hope that more children can participate in iSTART's co-creation activities. Therefore, we have made a 1:50 exhibition hall model to restore the real exhibition hall space as completely as possible. In the process of participating in the workshop with small curators, small editors and children from other units, ta began to add their own inspiration and design to the model. In the end, we all turned ta's ideas into reality and became many highlights of this exhibition.
Child-friendly design is still a relatively less concerned field in China. We hope that through the co-creation design method of "child-participatory design", "child-friendly design" will not simply look "child-friendly" and "friendly", but will explore the "flexible" spatial scale to find the "internal and external" child-friendly design in the selection of more environmentally friendly and sustainable materials, let children participate in the space, from the perspective of Ta to understand, touch, like the space.
Start Design C is a twin-city design studio located in Chengdu and Frankfurt, which was jointly established by Chinese architect Wu Kaixun and German architect Patrick Euler. We believe that extensive cross-border cooperation and diversified cross-cultural communication are the vitality of design. Let design as a medium to create more public participation with less natural energy consumption is more.
Wu Kaixun, architect, starting design partner, master of architectural design from Stä delschule School of Art, Germany, and chairman of e.V. Art Design Curatorial Team of Frankfurt Option17.
