Art from Nature

08/19/2010

Life is a grindstone, and whether it grinds a man down or polishes him up depends on the stuff he's made of.
Josh Billings

The World Forum Foundation is enriched by its partnership with the early childhood community in Bolivia. Led by Maria Carmen Schulze (to whom this work is now dedicated) and Roxana Salazar, early childhood educators in Bolivia have explored how they can promote children's creativity through art in even the most impoverished settings. The result is a series of beautiful, bilingual books sharing how to promote drawing, modeling, and construction with natural materials. In the introduction to the second book in the series, Modeling with Children Under Six Years Old, Salazar and Schulze explained their challenge:

"....We realised that we needed to provide alternatives for what we did not have. For example, where we did not have tables, we had flat areas of earth; where we did not have pencils, we had branches and charcoal; where we did not have white papers, we had old newspapers and flat stones; where we did not have colours, we had plants, flowers, fruits and soil; and where we did not have teachers, we had mothers and young community volunteers. The constant was, however, that we always have children who want to live, to learn, and to dream. We discovered that the transcendental value of living was strongly rooted despite the lack of materials in this urban or rural poverty context...

"In short, this situation motivated us to begin looking for alternatives and real possibilities, and to promote sustained creativity in the minds of the children and the community educators. The situation of poverty should not paralyze our aspirations and the integral development of our children. On the contrary, we found that the context of poverty was the genuine source of our liberation. In that web of miseries and ventures, we were able to find solutions by using what was in the environment. This comprised of three components:

Social component: we had families who were of very low income and few material possessions, but who were willing to participate extensively.
Nature component: we had a beautiful and mysterious landscape of mountains, forests, and rivers with their different climates.
Cultural component: we had languages, traditions, legends, dances, songs, and art.

"This experience has convinced us of the hypothesis outlined in the first document: 'the child develops his/her artistic potential in spite of the conditions of poverty, as long as his/her brain is not affected and has a motivational atmosphere in his/her environment'."

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