Smells and Colours! (lower primary)

Tour with workshop activities

Educational objectives and activities
As they explore Anicka Yi’s Metaspore exhibition, the children will discover how the artist focuses on the senses of smell, touch, and taste, which are generally somewhat neglected in the visual arts.

The children will explore the exhibition together with the arts tutors, paying particular attention to the works that use the sense of smell, which is Anicka Yi’s favourite, as it is related to the concept of identity and to the processing of emotions and long-term memory. In her work, she uses perfumes and fragrances as sculptures in their own right and they can carry us away to places that are far away in time and space. As the children explore the exhibition, they will come to see how Anicka Yi adopts a synaesthetic approach in her works to create the perceptual conditions in which different senses are activated simultaneously.

In the laboratory session, the children will play a game in which they will try to recognise smells in order to activate the olfactory dimension that is so important for the artist, and they will later be invited to imagine and give visible form to the fragrances through shapes and colours. During this activity, the children will create a synaesthetic work by personally experiencing the connections between stimuli that act upon different functions of our body and mind, but which are always intimately interlinked.

Focus areas

• Science
• Art and Image