Now:
- From 18 April to 29 June 2025: School visits to the exhibition Chrysalides by Ilaria Sagaria (detailed information below)
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From 18 April to 29 June 2025:
Exhibition Chrysalides
by Ilaria Sagaria
Maison de l’enfance et de l’adolescence (HUG)
What do we keep from our childhood? What remains of its magic and that existential fragility that seems impossible to hold back?
Since I started working as a teacher, I found myself catapulted into an unexpected world. Day after day I began to look at childhood with different eyes: I saw in these little figures tender and dark creatures at the same time, like chrysalises heading towards something unknown. Since ancient times, human beings have been fascinated by the mystery of metamorphosis, like a message chat has never been deciphered. This work is an attempt to investigate adolescence as a story of being and its change on multiple overlapping levels.
In the world of insects, the chrysalis represents the nymphal stage of butterflies preparing to undergo a metamorphosis; in psychology, however it implies the infinite potential of being in the phases of its transformations: just as the butterfly emerges at the end of a mysterious process of change, similarly human consciousness goes through various phases, enclosing a process and a history.
Within a poetic and psychological dimension of change, intimacy becomes sensorial trespass: our mind, frame after frame, finds itself involved in a pseudoscientific dimension where enchantment and reality overlap. Dreamlike figures seem to abandon themselves to a mechanism of perpetual temporal dilation capable of softening their entry into adult life. Dreamy looks with a hermetic and intimate flavour, interrupted gestures chat give life to those sentimental anxieties inherent in growth.
THEMES AND DISCIPLINES
Questions addressed during the visit include, depending on the age of the pupils:
- Adolescence: How do you represent what you can’t see?
- The metaphor of the chrysalis: what do a chrysalis and a child have in common?
- Science, biology and the archive: how do you combine science and art?
- Portraiture and representation: how has the artist photographed the teenage girls, and how do they collaborate with the photographer?
Depending on the age of the pupils, the subjects and themes covered during the visit include:
- Adolescence, metamorphosis, changes to the body
- Metaphor-Science, biology, archives
- Photography, art, poetry, portraiture
- Dreams, reality
Venue
Fondation Convergences
Maison de l’enfance et de l’adolescence des HUG
Boulevard de la Cluse 26
1205 Genève
Dates
18th April to 29th June 2025
Hours
Visits with the facilitator by reservation only from Monday to Friday between 9:00 and 18:00. Tours without a facilitator are also possible, preferably by prior arrangement, when the Maison de l’enfance et de l’adolescence is open to the public (Monday to Friday, 9h-20h).
Age
all school degrees from 8 years old (5P)
Duration of the visit
30 minutes
Languages
French or English
Price
free for classes
Reservation
via the online form
Further information
by email at visites@centrephotogeneve.ch or by phone at 022 329 28 35
Preparatory visit
Admission is free for teachers wishing to prepare a visit with their class. The preparatory visit is possible during the public opening of the Maison de l’enfance et de l’adolescence, from Monday to Friday, 9h-20h.
FURTHER INFORMATION