Roots

Roots. What are they? What are their powers? They anchor things to the ground. Forever? Do only plants have roots? What about us, people moving from place to place, because we want to… or have to… uprooted… rescued? Do we become someone else in new surroundings? What part of our homeland makes us who we are? Roots… Join us in the artistic quest for our roots.

Workshops for parents with children aged 4 and over.

The workshop is part of the Children at Liberty programme, curated by Maja Brzozowska and Elżbieta Niewiadomska-Wieczorek. This year, the programme is celebrating its 10th anniversary. 

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Geographies of imagination for Children at Liberty

Children at Liberty was born out of the need to create an artistic space and draw an imaginative map that would allow us to reach the world of children’s thoughts and actions without any shortcuts. We wanted to let ourselves be led by these nonadult guides, to celebrate children’s artistic work, their freedom and nonconformity; to hang question marks where we would normally put periods asking: Who are the little people in the urban space? How do they feel within it? What artistic languages can they use to mark their agency?  To answer these questions, we designed incentives for diverse, multi-sensual explorations and spaces where children are at liberty to feel important, have fun and enjoy being who they are. 

Today, during the anniversary edition which crowns a decade of our exercise in imagination, we are celebrating, above all, our mutual independence, no longer fearing that children are submissive because we don’t give them agency, or passive because we don’t let them be active. Nurturing our feelings of (co)participation, we invite you to celebrate sharing in activities that awaken our senses and flows, that merge times and spaces into a geography of imagination. We will search for our roots and creatively think about what it means to be replanted. In a dense web of dreams and wishes, we will become part of the multicultural tradition of entrusting to trees the most precious thing we have: hope. We will indulge ourselves in memories and textures of flavours and smells. We will participate in movement, flow, changeability and time. We may be wonderful just for a moment, but it is wonderful that we are.

Maja Brzozowska
Elżbieta Niewiadomska-Wieczorek (programme consultant)