Looking out to look within: a day at Arte Sella

Touching the artwork is strictly forbidden in this museum. Oh wait, no. Not today. Art is usually something we look at from a distance: behind a glass case, beyond a rope, under the watchful eye of a guard. At Arte Sella, it’s the other way around. The works live in the woods, made of branches, logs, leaves and stones, and you can walk up to them, touch them, feel them and step right through them. This is where our PYP4 students from the Vicenza Campus spent the day, as part of a unit built around a question as simple as it is vast: what does it mean to be a living thing on this planet? In class, students are discovering what biomes and ecosystems are and the challenges life faces in each of them, taking on the perspective of different forms of life along the way. Then the focus widens to include human beings: how we interact with the environment, and the impact we have on it. Arte Sella was the perfect place to bring these ideas to life. The works in the park are not finished, static objects. They are in constant dialogue with their surroundings. Rain darkens them, wind bends them, moss covers them, the seasons transform them. The artist begins the work and nature carries it on. Each piece is alive precisely because it changes. And perhaps this was the most valuable lesson of the day: where there is more nature, there is more chaos, and where there is chaos, there is life. A balance we cannot control, only be part of. Thinking beyond ourselves and our own community, and recognizing our place in a complex, interconnected and fragile system, is what this Unit of Inquiry is all about. Sometimes, to understand that, all it takes is placing your hands on a tree trunk.