Artasia 2025
PROTEST IS A PRINCIPLE OF ART
A Summer Grounded in the Hundred Languages of Children.
This summer, Artasia invites children to explore the many ways they express themselves—through movement, storytelling, building, imagining, and playing. Inspired by the poem The Hundred Languages of Children by Loris Malaguzzi, this year’s program honours the idea that children learn and communicate not just with words, but with their whole bodies, senses, and spirits.
Each week, children will be introduced to a new theme based on the elements of dance—Body, Space, Time, Energy, and Relationship—through hands-on creative experiences designed to spark curiosity and joy. Whether it’s making marks with natural materials, exploring textures and patterns with digital tools, or moving through space in playful and thoughtful ways, children will be supported to follow their ideas and express themselves fully.
The Hundred Languages
“Children as human beings, possess a hundred languages: a hundred ways of thinking, expressing, understanding, of encountering otherness through a way of thinking that weaves together and does not separate the various dimensions of experience. The hundred languages are a metaphor for the extraordinary potentials of children, their knowledge-building and creative processes, the myriad forms with which life is manifested and knowledge is constructed.
It is the responsibility of [the adult] to valorise all verbal and non-verbal languages with equal dignity.”
Process, Play, and Presence.
We believe that when children are free to explore, create, and play, they show us who they are and how they see the world. This, too, is a form of protest: claiming space for imagination, for presence, and for voices that are often overlooked.
At the end of the summer, Artasia will be part of Supercrawl 2025, where the themes of the program will be reflected in a large community art installation. While the exhibition may not showcase individual children’s work, it will be shaped by their spirit, ideas, and explorations.
This summer, we say with the children:
“No Way. The hundred is there.”
Weekly Activities
Each weekly activity is crafted by the Artasia 2025 team to deliver the core message of this year’s theme. This year, we looked to Loris Malaguzzi’s poem 100 Languages of Children, and asked some questions of our own.
Week 1: The Expressive, Knowing Body
The body is our first language—our way of being, feeling, and expressing before we even speak. This week, children explore their own physical presence and gestures through movement and making.
Inspired by Malaguzzi’s words:
“They tell the child to think without hands…”
“They tell the child to do without head… to understand without joy…
No way. The hundred is there.”
We ask: How are we all connected through our bodies?
Week 2: Claiming and Reshaping Space
Space is never neutral. This week, children explore how they can reshape, reclaim, and transform space with their ideas and bodies. From floor to sky, table to sidewalk—every surface becomes a place of possibility.
Inspired by Malaguzzi’s words:
“They tell the child: that work and play / reality and fantasy… / are things that do not belong together.”
We ask: What if space could be for both?
Week 3: Memory, Change, Duration
Time is a material we move through—but it also moves through us.
This week invites children to explore how memory, repetition, layering, and revisiting can help us see and feel time.
Inspired by Malaguzzi’s words:
“A hundred worlds / to discover / a hundred worlds / to invent / a hundred worlds / to dream.”
We ask: How do we leave traces through time? What changes, and what remains?
Week 4: Emotion, Drive, Vibrancy
Energy is the invisible force that moves us—through feelings, through bodies, through ideas. This week, children will explore how their inner energy transforms materials, colours, and space.
Inspired by Malaguzzi’s words:
“To understand without joy… to love and to marvel only at Easter and Christmas.”
We ask: How do children express their energy every day? What colours, marks, and motions emerge from joy, curiosity, or intensity?
Week 5: Reciprocity, Care, Connection
Relationships are the threads that connect us—to people, places, and ourselves.
This week invites children to explore care, collaboration, and connection through shared art-making.
Inspired by Malaguzzi’s vision of the hundred languages of connection, we ask:
How do we listen, respond, and grow together through creative acts?
What do we discover when we make with instead of alone?