Meeting 19/10/2024

CHILDREN TELL THEMSELVES IN VIDEO, the meeting

On 19 October 2024 a small group of people in Brescia talks about audiovisual communication, children and young people. It is not just a list of experiences and opinions, there is something to build, to safeguard the memory and the confrontation, stimulate possible knowledge and doing together, beyond the clichés, the resignation to the omnipotence of the market, the difficulty of providing education appropriate to the present time.

Not left alone with themselves, when they can play, work and express themselves together, children tell us about themselves, teach us a nonconformist way of using the medium video and technology in general, finding with the body, the nature, places and objects of our life a possible harmony, which is sometimes problematic for their parents and grandparents, bewildered by real changes and even more by the ideology of change and uncertainty that agitates our societies.

Children’s video works tell and suggest, and thanks to the Internet can be collected in a multimedia library accessible to all, for professionals, schools, groups, interested citizens and the children themselves, a virtual place where audiovisual documents from all over the world are collected and made available.

During the meeting, participants discuss what, without worrying or claiming to overcome all the problems of school and society, can be done concretely to:

Recover and not waste memory and practices that, over the decades, have shown positive solutions to the educational challenges of modern times, with children and young people active subjects and not only subject of other people’s speeches and policies.
Show a serene and productive use of technology, beyond the widespread ignorance, flat bureaucracy and consumption only individual that generates competition, conformity, dissatisfaction.
Collect in a multimedia library on the Internet various and significant evidence of the living presence of children in the world, organized so that the visitor can orient himself and be encouraged to publish relevant and selected content, beyond the dispersion of commercial social networks.
Build an open international network dedicated to children’s works (video but not only), inclusive, based on a few minimum elements that allow it to function over time, starting from the positive or negative experiences of past and present networks.
Organize directly, or monitor projects and workshops in the territory, events and exhibitions, placing itself as a fulcrum for the collection of material and stimulating collaboration and mutual information, so that the activity of many actors, often scattered and isolated, becomes a critical mass visible to public opinion.

A project and network to connect the memory and experience of the powerful and vivid messages that children transmit when they are put in the position to play with technology and the world.

We try to see and evaluate together the opportunities and difficulties, the actions to be taken, without adding additional work loads to the daily stress of the individuals, but organizing better and with more satisfaction what we already do.

Discussion and work proposal by Paolo Beneventi , October 2024