Vedere significa comprendere? Dall’identità reale a quella virtuale

The Educational Department of Pirelli HangarBicocca presents Vedere significa comprendere? Dall’identità reale a quella virtuale (“Does Seeing Mean Understanding? From Real to Virtual Identity”), a training course for lower-secondary school teachers, created together with the artistic duo The Cool Couple, with the collaboration of the Degree Course in Primary Education, Riccardo Massa Department of Human Sciences for Education of the University of Milano-Bicocca.

This new training course is designed to involve teachers in a participatory planning process based on ideas offered by Bruce Nauman’s Neons Corridors Rooms exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca. Bringing to bear the vision and skills of The Cool Couple, the activities offer new educational tools that promote the importance of physical experience and the value of the perceptive, sensory, emotional and rational faculties of the body to find out about others and oneself – in contrast to the systematic digitisation of many actions, situations and areas of everyday life. Within this context, discussions will be held on the relationship between the real and virtual worlds, addressing issues such as the dematerialisation of the body, the fragmentation and expansion of online identity and the apparent abolition of the boundary between the public and private dimension in the digital world.

After the online presentation of the project on Monday, 19 December 2022 at 6 p.m., for which registration is required, twenty teachers will be selected to take part in the training course. This will involve both face-to-face events at the Pirelli HangarBicocca exhibition centre and live-streamed meetings.

The course consists of three meetings which include:

- an introduction to the methods of The Cool Couple, whose main area of research and experimentation is the study and analysis of images and communications in the digital universe;

- an analysis of the way children use languages and digital technologies, in order to turn them into teaching tools that can help bring about a return to the real world and reconnect it to the virtual world;

- practical activities both at and away from the exhibition to create experiences based on the principle that direct physical knowledge of the world can help open up new point of views that can help us understand and process the real world.

Those who are selected as participants will work together with the artists during all the meetings and they will be provided with the study materials and bibliographies they need. After an initial study phase, which will include activities for reflection and analysis, the teachers will be asked to design educational courses for their students, based on their own disciplinary skills. These will then be shared and discussed with the whole working group.

The course is free of charge and limited to a maximum of 20 participants, who can submit their application form between Tuesday, 20 December 2022 and Thursday, 12 January 2023 following the instructions given in the “Useful Info” section.

Calendar of events:

• Monday, 19 December 2022, 6 p.m.
  Meeting, open to all, to present the Vedere significa comprendere? project
  Format: digital. Registration required – please write to hbschool@hangarbicocca.org
• Saturday, 21 January 2023 from 9.30 a.m. to 1.30 p.m.
  Start of the project: presentation of all those involved, workshop, focus session and analysis of the subject of body and identity in the real and virtual worlds
  Format: in person, at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Via Chiese 2, Milan
• Monday, 30 January 2023, from 5 to 8 p.m.
  The relationship between image, word and language in the creative process: focus session, analysis and workshop
  Format: digital, online
• Saturday, 4 February 2023, from 9.30 a.m. to 1.30 p.m.
  Joint drafting and planning of classroom and distance learning courses
  Sharing and discussion of the proposed courses with all the participants and teachers
  Format: in person, at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Via Chiese 2, Milan