training course 

Three sessions devoted to The Senses in Art - touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight - will allow us to read and interpret art through the work of contemporary artists, and to explore and experiment with a range of possible creative processes:  visual stimuli, readings, and practical experience to train your perception and to boost your awareness.

At all of these sessions we will be using workshop-kits consisting in educational apparatus accompanied by work pads and books by artists and illustrators from the Art Bookshelf collection.

Touch and Sight
workshop session
Our eyes allow us to see shapes and colours and to gauge the intensity of light, to enjoy broad views or to pick out minute details. Looking through a keyhole, a microscope, weird glasses and coloured filtres, we can turn our vision into a creative game offering us a somewhat different and unexpected view of the world. We don't use sight alone to recognise an object but also our sense of touch. Our hands are a crucial tool in fostering our understanding of the world around us.  From the Futurist Manifesto to Tactilism and to Bruno Munari's tactile pictures, we will be exploring tactile matter and materials in depth.

Smell and Taste
workshop session
Our sense of taste allows us to distinguish sweetness, saltiness, sharpness, and bitterness.  We will be looking at Futurist tasting "rules" for food, and at other quotations from the world of fairy tales.  Our definition of tastes helps us to discover potential links with people's temperaments, allowing us to turn a menu into an autobiography. We use our noses to capture the many odour-based stimuli around us.  Plants, animals, food... everything gives off a different and often unique aroma.  We will be analysing the many potential categories of smell and the ease with which an untrained nose can be misled in its perceptions.

Hearing and sixth Sense
workshop session
With the help of a reading from Luigi Russolo's The Art of Noise and of gymnastic exercises designed to fine-tune our hearing, we will be learning to pick up the myriad sounds all around us, discovering the differences between sound, noise and music and ending up with ears even more perceptive than our eyes. It concludes with a reflection on the mysterious sixth sense.

Info
Saturday (look the calendar of event)
from 10.30 am to 5.00 pm
€ 50 per seminar (€ 40 for members); € 130 for the whole course (€104 for members)
booking obligatory accepted up to 7 days before the start of each seminar tel. 06.39967500