Winter is Coming!
Winter Creative Workshops for Kids 2026 in Milan

The Education Department of Pirelli HangarBicocca, on December 16 and 17, presents the special program “Winter is coming!”: free workshops for children aged 7 and up and their families designed to explore and discover the works of Thao Nguyen Phan through the unique characteristics of watercolor technique.

At the beginning of each workshop, all participants have the chance to watch painter and illustrator Alessandro Sanna paint live, who then guides them step by step into the world of watercolors, revealing some painter’s secrets. Inspired by the exhibition “Reincarnations of Shadows”, children and families practice using only water and brushes on a special “magic paper” and then create their own watercolor composed of colors and black silhouettes.

Alessandro Sanna imagines a long river made of paper waiting to be animated by visitors. Inspired by Thao Nguyen Phan’s exhibition, visitors can enrich the trace left by Sanna with a black marker and lots of imagination or experiment with the “magic paper” using water and a brush.

Alessandro Sanna (Nogara, 1975) is a painter and illustrator. He lives and works in Mantua and teaches Drawing and Illustration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. He is one of the leading names in contemporary Italian and international illustration. He has collaborated with dozens of writers and publishers, and his illustrated books have been translated and published in Germany, Spain, Japan, the United States, and other countries. His work has earned him three Andersen Awards, including “Best Illustrator” for “Hai mai visto Mondrian?” (Artebambini, 2006), and a nomination in 2016 for the Hans Christian Andersen Award.

The Education Department of Pirelli HangarBicocca, on December 17 and 18, presents the special program “Winter is coming!”: two free workshops in two sessions for children aged 6 to 10 and their families designed to explore and discover the works of Dineo Seshee Bopape through creative processes related to poetry, words, rhythm, and music, and through experimentation with natural materials.

Inspired by the exhibition “Born in the first light of the morning [moswara’marapo]” poet Fedouà El Attari combines words and natural materials to create new forms of poetry with multisensory characteristics; musicians Magatte Dieng and Elena Russo embark on a magical journey into the heart of African traditions, made of tribal sounds, songs, and dances.

Fedouà El Attari is a poet and cultural curator of “PoeTerapy: the word as healing through listening.” After studying Architecture, exhibition design, and museum setup, she curates and promotes cultural events in museums, educational, socio-urban, and editorial contexts.

Ablaye Magatte Dieng, born in Dakar, is a musician and percussionist. He descends from a great family of Griots, the storytellers, entertainers, musicians, and artists of Senegalese society who still pass down their culture orally. He leads various music projects and is the founder and artistic director of the Cultural Association Tamra. He organizes festivals, events, shows, and courses in African dance and percussion in venues and schools in Turin.

Elena Russo is a Kora player and luthier. After years of studying piano, she dedicated herself to African percussion and later to the kora, a traditional plucked string instrument of the Mandinka ethnic group, mainly played by Griots. Over the years, Elena became passionate about building her own instruments—koras, n’gonis, and djembés. She teaches, leads kora workshops, and performs as a street artist.

The Education Department of Pirelli HangarBicocca, on December 12, 18, and 19, presents three free workshops for children aged 6 to 10 designed to explore and discover the works of Maurizio Cattelan through creative processes related to movement, sound, and storytelling.

Inspired by the exhibition “Breath Ghosts Blind,” the duo Luci su Marte explores the relationship between the artworks and the exhibition space through body language; musician Davide Tedesco investigates what lies within silence between emotions and memories to experiment and become aware of our sonic identity; writer Francesco Gungui creates stories with participants using a new and original deck of cards inspired by the evocative scenography of the exhibition.

Luci su Marte is an independent project curated by Lucia Sauro, dancer and performer, and Marta Tedolfi, museum educator. Together, they explore new ways of experiencing and interpreting art through research focused on the body and movement. By integrating their personal skills in two distinct yet closely related languages, they have developed a series of workshops in collaboration with museum institutions and cultural associations.

Francesco Gungui (Milan, 1980) is a writer and author of numerous novels. Between 2020 and 2021, he published the adventure series of Jack Pigòn (Giunti), dedicated to elementary school children, and has been engaged in a digital tour on MEET with schools across Italy. A storyteller by passion, improvisational cook, failed painter, he loves playing with stories and sharing this passion. He lives in Milan with his wife and two children, his muses and precious helpers.

Davide Tedesco is a musician and music educator focused on the interaction between disciplines and cultures. He teaches music education in Milan and founded My Music Skills ©, an educational project that uses music for holistic personal development. He is a co-founder and double bassist of the NefEsh trio and has played in various ensembles across classical, jazz, pop, ethnic, world, and improvised music. In 2016, he created Unconventionalspaces, a project centered on the potential of sound beyond music, and in the same year composed original music for the short film “Thankyou Rebbe” by director Daniel Vital.