Thank you all for your presence at our exhibition.
It was very nice to host you in the space of Rotacyjny Dom(ku) Kultury in Warsaw’s Jazdów. We would also like to thank the organisers, Dom Kultury Śródmieście, for the possibility of presenting our works, including the title Zuzia on truancy 🙂
It was the second instalment of the „Remix of the booklets” project. The first was on internet, here. At the exhibition, we presented a dozen or so cut-outs and collages we made of our daughters’ readings. You are probably asking yourselves why did we remix them? 🙂
The idea to remix the books came from reading them with our four-year-old daughter Guta and two-year-old Gaja. We noticed the world depicted in the books is often populated by characters in template social, cultural and gender roles: girls iron and do the housework, boys passionately play with trains and cars, mothers cook while fathers work behind bookcases full of books, animals are anthropomorphised with meat on their plates and characters from other parts of the world are presented in a stereotypical, often hurtful way. In a nutshell, children’s books often show how we adults see the world. The openness and curiosity of the child are lost somewhere.
Do we adults allow children to be themselves? Are we afraid of their ideas, emotions and words? Or is it due to a lack of broader reflection? These cases often also apply to heroes and authors of popular and well-liked books, e.g. our beloved Binta and Lalo 🙂
The second issue is the showing of emotions. It is not acceptable to cry, get angry or whine when eating. A disobedient child awaits punishment and only becomes „good” when he complies with the demands imposed by his parents. Do we ask too much of our kids? We have corrected that too.
So we created an unusual exhibition about children’s reading. We subjected a dozen selected books to critical reading and then to creative intervention. Our tools were collage and drawing.
This is the second instalment of the booklet remix project. The first took place last year, online. This time, to our delight, the project took place in stationery, in a cosy little house in Warsaw’s Jazdów. During the exhibition, we showed over a dozen new reworkings, as well as some selected works from the previous edition, including the very popular Ali 🙂
The project was held thanks to Warsaw City ( Dom Kultury Śródmieście – Community Centre Downtown) and under the patronage of Kontakt Magazine and Wolne Lektury.
bebegu 