foreword A visual journey into the collective images of the worlD Each language enables to conceive the world differently - untranslatable words allow us to discover unimaginable things. Can symbols, signs and folkloric drawings of the world’s cultures tell us new stories? This game aims to stimulate children’s curiosity about the cultures of the world. If we could collect all the world’s tales into one single book, we would be able to answer to each and every question. According to Alberto Manzi, teacher and presenter of the Italian educational TV programme It is never too late (broadcast on Rai, 1960-1968), both fables and science aim to a better understanding of the world. Even if with different tools and methods, they make the same effort to create a coherent meaning system. The game, created by Alessandra Falconi, is made up of a briefcase which contains folkloric signs and images from all over the world, designed by the illustrator Camilla Falsini. Why folklore? We might think of it as a primordial, open and shared storage of signs, symbols and meanings that helps people to give sense to their everyday lives, in order to face changes, challenges, the transition from disorder to order, the separation between the good and the evil. Folklore nurtures and is nurtured by myths and rituals that attempt to answer the great questions: Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is at the centre of the earth? How can you explain a rainbow?
1 Andrea Prandin in Re-inventare la famiglia, by Laura Formenti, Apogeo, 2011 (Chapter 6 – Posizionamenti estetici e ricerca della bellezza) 2 Formenti, 2002, quoted by Andrea Prandin 3 Marco Dallari, L’arte per i bambini 4 thanks to Anna Maria Testa for her suggestions on creativity
Every culture has attempted to answer these and other questions. It is a fascinating journey into stories, images, decorations and drawings of people who, though far from each other, have tried to give a meaning to the world we live in and to their own lives. Indeed, regardless place and time, human beings felt the need to understand reality: stories have the power to «establish connections and structures, therefore organising human experience from beginning, to continuation, to end».1 It is very important that children become familiar with the genuine pleasure for narration in order to construct their own symbolic space: «the children’s self-narration (their own narrative identity) is inseparably linked to the qualities of the stories they learned to relate».2 It was our desire to provide curious children with a game that explores the past and tells the future by means of sings, symbols and stories of cultures from all over the world. Marco Dallari writes: «sensitivity, a gift common to everyone, is nurtured by symbolic networks through a constant, never-ending literacy process. By "literacy process" I mean the capability of actively and critically participating in the cultural processes of a community»3 . With the Briefcase, we attempt to make a new and useful contribution to enrich one’s sensitivity by observing other cultures and therefore to participate into the community life in an including, joyful, creative and delicate way. The selection of images and folkloric contents, while stimulating our sensitivity, shapes the way children image, conceive and understand the world - and also, we may add, learning them how to appreciate it. Our increasingly multicultural classrooms act as important depositories for 3