by Silvana Sperati.
In the 90s, I was experimenting with the Munari Method in a nursery school. At that time, I had a great “consultant”, a special friend. I met him once a month or every two months, showing the experiments carried out with the children. This was Bruno Munari. I believe this memory can help us to understand what the extraordinary person he was and above all his willingness to welcome young people, stimulating them in their projects. Following one of those projects, we organized an exhibition of fancy animals made by children using only recycled paper. The title was chosen by Munari himself: “Paper Fantasies”. In the first half of the 90s, at the art gallery “Il Vicolo in Voghera”, the exhibition was set up spending only 25,000 liras for an ingenious installation made of cardboard on which the works were hung by pins.
On that occasion, I gave Bruno a reproduction of one of the children’s works made by an artisan using fragments of coloured glass. The whole thing was suspended with a metal string. Shortly afterward, I went to visit him in Milan. He did not receive me in his studio, but in his house on the top floor of the building.
We went to his beautiful terrace where his special “bonsai garden” was set up; he had been taking care of it for years. In a sort of “little house” built in this roof garden, there was a small table and all the gardening tools. Here with pleasure, I saw again the children’s work hung by the string; hit by sun, it sent out coloured shadows. That was a special place for Bruno: there, he spent a lot of time taking care of the plants and during the winter it became the perfect place to shelter them from bad weather.
On that occasion, Bruno showed me all his crops and explained some of the procedures he followed to take care of the saplings. One of these was an oleander. It had been given to him as a wedding present by his father-in-law. In that space, I understood he was the absolute protagonist. A corner of green among the roofs of Milan. A space where he had the possibility to continue the curious observations that had so involved him as a child. His attention and ability to grasp every element, every variable, without limits. For this reason, for him, nature had become the privileged place for studying changes.
He did not only observe what could happen in a particular moment, but his attention was focused on understanding the processes. Why did that element have that shape? What had generated it? How would it have transformed? For this reason, day after day, Munari invites us to observe all the changes nature prepares next to us. To do this, it can be useful to get used to taking notes in a scrapbook, making sketches. Continuum learning stimulate by the curiosity to know.
From this, the “diary of a rose” was born. It is an activity that I propose both to adults and children. When you can reside for a few days in the countryside, you can decide which flower, among all those present in the propitious season, you like the most. After that, with a previously established frequency, you leave every activity that involves you to go and observe the changes the flower manifests day after day.
Changes in shape, colour, tone, and structure itself. Up to the transformations deriving from the influence of the external environment: the light at different times of the day, rain rather than night. It is a very enriching experience. Once, during a training course for adults, I asked a colleague to ring a bell a few times, by surprise, to remind the students of that observation. However, the colleague rang too often or forgot it. Even that fact became a game.