In the Echo of the Unspoken

Abstract

In four art class sessions, children around the age of 10 will artistically explore the theme of war/peace. They will delve into what is known and can be perceived with the senses with what comes to mind (Smit et al. 2020, p. 157). This also means opening up art education to the unforeseeable, so that heterotopic spaces for rearranging and reinterpreting worldviews and self-understanding emerge (Spahn 2022, p. 21; Wuttig 2016, p. 406). However, it also means listening during class to echoes of the unspoken in order to expand, transform, or even overturn perception ... (Smit et al. 2020, p. 157). Descriptions, analyses, and interpretations remain in the air; quite a challenging endeavor, as the focus is not on what's visible and familiar, but on what may also be semi-visible and invisible and, much rather, aesthetically perceptible. This, in turn, finds its echo only aesthetically in a translation of language. So my aesthetic writing along the lines of sensitive questions and answers that make a sensual perception of the world, of others, of oneself tangible. The question is directed to war and peace, how things are lived, read, written, told, seen, touched, managed, worked, cut, remembered, produced, and known (Ahmed and Stacey 2001, p. 2). The answers in the unspoken echo of what is known and can be perceived with the senses with what comes to mind (Smit et al. 2020, p. 157). Making children's (self) image tangible.