Family festival Garage Under-18

With the world enduring as an infinite network of connections and relationships between things, people, events, and phenomena, the majority of these “intersection knots” nevertheless often elude our attention. Artists, writers, and directors make these conjunctions visible and even tangible.

Garage educators will engage the visitors in an exciting game of staged installations. The participants will try out the role of directors in an invisible theater, where, by the power of imagination alone, objects are given voices and put in a dialogue with each other, thus revealing their invisible bonds with people.

By combining the necessity to offer practical solutions with the freedom of a genuinely artistic imagination, design operates as a universal language. In fact, a tiny icon on the screen of a gadget can replace an entire verbal sentence, while a chair will always remain a chair, regardless of its extravagant shape or the unusual materials it is made of.

Using available and improvised materials, educators from the Danish Museum of Art and Design (Copenhagen) will offer the visitors the chance to experiment in furniture design and production in the space of Garage Kids' Room and participate in a thrilling linguistic test, set to reveal whether it is possible to replace verbal language completely with the visual one—using images, gestures, and objects— when people of different countries and cultures meet each other.

Apparently, most children would prefer to replace school text books with cartoons. Animation is a great tool for articulating complex phenomena in a simple and telling way or for sharing one’s thoughts with others. Learning new things is always a delightful process, but explaining them to another person may be not that easy. This is when animation can be really helpful. Together with the tutors, children and adults will narrate their original short stories using the technique of cutout animation. 

Ideas and imagination are more crucial for creativity than materials. Using imagination only, one is able to transform a thing into a dozen different objects. Imagination is the basis of all creative practices. What can a simple sheet of paper become? It can turn into a letter or a memory container, become a mask that covers face, a toy, a canvas, or a sculpture—it can be almost anything provided that imagination is involved. Everyone is welcome to try and witness such transformations in the space of the Ten experiments lab.

Certain art projects instigate the viewers to engage in an investigation of new phenomena and their individual perception thereof. The exhibition Infinite Ear creates a unique acoustic environment where one can sense, imagine, comprehend, and hear sound in new ways, which is possible thanks to the original musical instruments invented by the artist Tarek Atoui, as well as via interaction with Garage’s art mediators and performers.