How to talk to children about Poland? What values, symbols and associations to refer to? Can such a conversation about our country, nationality and civic attitudes be interesting and easy for children to learn? Yes of course! This is evidenced by the exhibition “Hug Poland”, which has just come to the capital. The authors of the exhibition focused on an accessible language of communication with the youngest, fun and stimulating all senses. Children can not only hug Poland, but also smell, hear and watch. Several thematic corners await visitors, each of them provoking conversations about civic attitudes or national symbols. Children can listen to Chopin’s music, smell traditional Polish dishes and learn about Polish flora and fauna. Everything happens in the surroundings of beautiful literature for children of all ages, toys made with great care and … large, cozy pillows in the shape of Poland. We advise you to reserve at least an hour and a half to explore this space and hug Poland. We know from our own experience that it is difficult to persuade children to leave the exhibition.
The curators of the “Hug Poland” exhibition are Małgosia Żmijska, Joanna Studzińska and Pola Amber from the creative collective Matka Projekt, authors of the great NIEMAPA and many other interesting projects and events for families. The space was arranged by the Tym_czasem and bro.Kat studios, and the author of the illustrations used in the exhibition is Patricija Bliuj-Stodulska.
The Warsaw edition of “Hug Poland” takes place on November 7-8, 2019 at the Koneser Praga Center. Admission is free, registration is required for workshops and organized tours for groups. There are still places! Details can be found on the website: przyulpolske.pl
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We met Joanna Studzińska and Małgosia Żmijska from Mum Projekt on the occasion of their exhibition “EkoEksperymentarium” as part of the Łódź Design Festival (we wrote about this exhibition HERE). The Warsaw premiere of “Hug Poland” was an opportunity to finish our conversation – about the need to look at Poland with distance and kindness, about the challenges of designing events for families and why it is worth doing it. We also asked in general where from, why and what kind of project we have 🙂
Joanna Barczuk, Parent in the City (RwM): Your first joint project was NIEMAPA.
Joanna Studzińska (J.S.): NIEMAPA was our first project, because we knew each other and worked together with Małgosia before. Our professional paths were constantly touching during festivals, exhibitions and other events. Then our babies were born and we got bored 🙂
RwM: And you wanted to continue your realization and do something creative?
J.S .: Matches in the eyes, but you had to do something not to go crazy at home. We have been implementing projects all our professional life, and now what – nothing?
RwM: It started with great NIEMAPs, but today we meet on the occasion of your exhibition. Is the fact that you have followed this path and are doing exhibitions a natural result of your previous professional experiences? Is it more of a coincidence?
J.S .: First of all, we knew that organizing exhibitions is not something unattainable. We created NIEMAPY and we already knew that it is a good material and that it functions as a nice guide for the youngest. We transformed the beautiful illustrations of Maciek Blaźniak into posters and bags. But we still wanted more. Then came an offer from Gdynia to organize an exhibition about the city, but in a “non-map” style. It wasn’t supposed to be an exhibition in the classical sense – no framed paintings or things like that. We wanted to show the city in a nutshell, just like in the paper NIEMAPIE, but in 3D and more experimentally. We built blocks and tenement houses between which you could walk. There was the sea and a picnic area. It turned out great, so we did a few more exhibitions about other cities. At the same time, new ideas and proposals appeared, including the idea of organizing an exhibition about Poland. The 100th anniversary of independence was approaching. We felt that Poland and patriotism were topics that are very much alive in us. This is evidenced by the fact that when we started talking about Poland, various disputes broke out between us – not that we were arguing, but we were discussing how and whether to talk to children about Poland. We decided that if there is so much emotion around this topic, it means that we have to deal with it.
Małgosia Żmijska (M.Ż.): There are many divisions and what separates us is more often heard than what unites us. It is difficult to talk about Poland at ease, this topic is strongly emotional and it has to do with many years of divisions in society.
J.S .: Let’s start with the word “patriotism”. Everyone understands it differently. The three of us organized the exhibition “Hug Poland” together with Pola Amber. Each of us defined this term differently, so the creative process took a long time, but I think that thanks to this the effect is very balanced.
RwM: With your exhibition you prove that you can talk about important national and patriotic topics without pathos and standing at attention. You are not giving a simple message. Rather, you allow each visitor, family or person, to find their own key to understanding Polishness and creating their own set of positive values and thoughts about Poland. What are your warmest associations with Poland and how many of your personal experiences and emotions can we see at this exhibition?
M.Ż .: As part of a hug, we propose several zones and the one that speaks of citizenship and the Constitution is closest to my heart. It was not easy to find such exhibition solutions that would allow you to easily talk about this subject to children, even the youngest. In addition, the participants of “Hug Poland” involve touch, hearing, smell and eyesight – because I perceive Poland with all my senses and I wanted the exhibition to reflect this.
JS: As for me and Pola Amber, we have two-national children, so we had to think hard about how to talk to kids about Poland – so as to show what it is like and teach it to love it just like that, but not try to prove that it is better.
RwM: How cozy is Poland?
J.S .: Poland is as cozy as our homes and our heads are! Openness, joy of life and, above all, respect for others and a well-understood civic attitude can make life better. It would be great if we could take such a distance to be able to realize that Poland is what it is, neither better nor worse, that it just has a lot of nice things and a lot to improve. And we, as its inhabitants, can benefit from it, but we have certain responsibilities in this connection.
RwM: This is not your first project related to Poland. It is hard to imagine a better way to promote and talk about our country than through a series of brilliant NIEMAPs, in which you encourage families with children to actively explore Polish cities and regions. Are such topics and education in this field particularly important to you?
M.Ż .: As mothers, we are looking for ways to spend time with our families in an “analogue” way. We want to experience with our children together, get to know them on the occasion of daily walks, better understand their needs and point of view, giving them the freedom to play, as it happens, for example, at “Hug Poland”. We translate these our personal needs into a professionally prepared project, but we constantly ask our recipients for their opinion and meet them.
RwM: Let’s talk about exhibitions for families with children. Did your previous professional experience in organizing exhibitions and events also include projects targeted at this audience? Is this your new creative path that you took when children entered your life?
M.Ż .: I often reflect on what is meant by design for families and design for children, and the label that hangs over us now …
Answering the question – our professional experience is based on the fact that we have contacts and knowledge about the world of architects, designers, illustrators and the implementation of events, as well as recognizing groups that participate in them and talking to them in an appropriate way. We use these skills to design in general. When we became mothers, we actually turned our interests to products for children. NIEMAPA Łódź was created because we wanted to talk about this city and introduce other families to the places we love and live in. Then it naturally developed so that our professional competences and the present life situation fit best in designing for families.
J.S .: When we became mothers, we also saw that there was a lot to do in this area. When a parent comes to a given city, he or she can go to the tourist information office and find out that there is a cathedral, an ethnographic museum and a city history museum there …
M.Ż .: And when he enters a museum, he usually starts with the information: do not touch. Of course, by becoming moms we gained this perspective and we discovered new needs related to being a parent.
RwM .: But I understand that this label – a design team for families – doesn’t bother you? The name of your tandem, Mamma Projekt, carries a fairly clear message. Or maybe you want to give it up or go beyond that?
M.Ż .: We will probably answer differently, because we are different and this allows us to work on cool things together. I am open to using my competences for various projects. Now we are working as much as possible in family projects, but what will happen in the future is a very open question.
J.S .: I think it is our strength that we do what interests us at the moment. We are lucky that we always choose the way we choose or hit projects that are important to us at a given moment in our lives. Now we are We have a Project, and in the future we may do something different, together or separately. This is a creative collective, not a forever company.
RwM .: What is the biggest challenge in designing exhibitions for families with children?
M.Ż .: I can see three areas of such challenges. First of all, you will never fully predict what the children at your exhibition will come up with, and safety is one of the most important issues in this case. We have often complained that despite the optimal protection of the exhibition and testing it in all possible ways, children can do something extra: unscrew something, break it off, move it. It is a huge challenge to design exhibitions that are interactive, i.e. allow you to move freely around them, but at the same time are resistant to this movement. Additionally, all this has to be done within a certain budget, which is intended for the temporary exhibition, so we have to struggle to use materials adapted to the safety of all visitors within a certain budget. Secondly, we try to design exhibitions for organized groups, i.e. invite such groups to an exhibition, but it is also important for us to work with families and individual visitors. Therefore, we must consider these two completely different situations with each of the elements of the exhibition. Everything must be prepared in such a way that the group can work well with the educator, but also so that the parent can handle the child on their own at the exhibition. This is not easy. And the third challenge for us is to fit into the context of the place where we work. We organize exhibitions in very different places. It is, for example, a museum with its stable structure that we enter; it is a festival with hundreds of thousands of visitors; Finally, it is a place that requires complete renovation. This is a big deal – before we recognize the exact environment in which we work, the project begins to end. And these are the three things that constitute the greatest challenge for me in the implementation of our projects.
RwM .: And isn’t it also difficult to design for different age groups? Your exhibitions are visited by both crawling toddlers, three-year-olds and nine-year-olds.
J.S .: We practically always use an illustration that we just love. What you are talking about is obviously a challenge, but I think we are handling it quite well. You need to have some inner ease and agree that not everyone has to read the instructions and not everyone has to take the same content from the exhibition. We have different levels of narration. Children who do not read can view the pictures and play simple games. Children learning to read are shown a text arranged especially for them, i.e. infographics or short instructions. Texts addressed to adults are of a different height, written in a different font and language. We try to differentiate it graphically and linguistically. Sometimes it looks as if there is too much text in our exhibitions, but thanks to this, different groups can find their message.
RwM: Isn’t it also about the youngest children simply intuitively entering such an exhibition space and feeling good there?
J.S .: I don’t expect the three-year-olds who come to the exhibition to remember anything about it. I just want them to remember that they went to the exhibition. That they would be aware of this fact. Children get used to the exhibition and the museum itself, so they stop being afraid of it. I think that many parents do not go to museums and other places of this type with their children at all, because they associate it with what these institutions used to be: showcases, slippers, strict guarding ladies, the message “do not touch”. By building this type of interactive and tangible exhibitions, we try to disenchant this sad stereotype of the museum a little.
RwM: Is your parent a challenge for you? In conversations with museum professionals, the topic of problematic or “ demanding” parents appears …
M.Ż .: There is no such thing as a problem parent. Some people just treat our exhibitions as a moment of buffer and a chance to rest for themselves. If they have the opportunity and see the educator working with the child, they often withdraw on their own. I do not want to judge it, because I understand that there are situations when we need a moment for ourselves or we feel incompetent in a given space and we prefer to be led by someone prepared for it. But our goal at the exhibitions we carry out is only to initiate this moment of interaction between the family and the exhibition.
J.S .: The educators come and go, they don’t show you around this exhibition from start to finish. We want parents and children to spend time together, have nice memories and build relationships with each other. And by the way, of course, they also learned something or came to some conclusions. And that is also a challenge.
RwM: What museums do you visit with your children? Which do you recommend and why?
J.S .: I remember from my childhood that my parents often went to museums with us. And even if they were arrowheads in a display case, they could create a story about them that would be remembered. With my daughter, we visit various places: both contemporary art exhibitions and science centers for children. It’s about being together and discovering together.
M.Ż .: I like visiting places where we can feel at ease with my busy children, and places that are not overloaded with stimuli. Often these are not front-line museums, i.e. the most popular and promoted in guidebooks. In my hometown of Łódź, in the attic of the Cinematography Museum, there is an exhibition dedicated to Polish animation for children. We are happy to hide there on a rainy day. I also recommend Kolejkowo in Gliwice. It is an interestingly designed place, full of “flavors” hidden among models for adults. For older kids (over 10 years old), I definitely recommend the Guido Mine in Zabrze. It’s an electrifying experience of going down the elevator (like miners used to do) a few hundred meters down, where the temperature is low, the sounds are muffled, it’s so “raw”.
RwM: What else will you surprise us with? More NIEMAPY, shows for families or something completely different?
M.Ż .: Since 2016, we have been working hand in hand with Joanna, dynamically developing, specializing and gaining extensive experience in the area of designing educational activities for families. In 2020, we want to expand our two exhibitions: “EkoEksperymentarium” and “Hug Poland”. We plan to rebuild them, drawing on the acquired knowledge and adapt them even better to the needs and expectations of the participants. There will also be new NIEMAPY, and there are also plans for completely new, fascinating directions of action, but let’s not get confused …
An interview with Joanna Barczuk
Report and photos from the exhibition “Hug Poland”: Dorota Belina