In the context of “Pedagogy of Hope,” the program dedicated to education as a practice of freedom and transformation, for the summer of 2026 GAMeC in Bergamo presents “Tabula Plena,” an exhibition by Fosbury Architecture and Claire Fontaine conceived as a permanent workshop that will transform the Sala delle Capriate of Palazzo della Ragione into a space for meeting and production of shared knowledge thanks in part to the contribution of Adelita Husni Bey, URPS (Ufficio Resurrezione Parole Smarrite) and Numero Cromatico.
The workshop platform designed by Fosbury Architecture-a collective that expands the boundaries of architecture through a multidisciplinary approach-was conceived in relation to the thought of Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire (Recife, 1921-São Paulo, 1997). In Freire’s vision, education is a process of emancipation through which subjects do not passively receive knowledge-hence the title of the platform, as opposed to the concept of tabula rasa-but critically construct it, developing awareness of their role in the world and the possibility of transforming it.
The project stems from the belief that the contemporary museum is not only a place of preservation and exhibition but a space of learning, dialogue and transformation, capable of welcoming diverse audiences and activating processes of shared knowledge. In a historical context marked by rapid social, technological and cultural changes, the laboratory is proposed as an open place in which to experiment with new forms of relationship, experience, cultural citizenship and knowledge.
With this in mind, Fosbury Architecture’s installation is presented as a habitable, welcoming and accessible platform that hosts three free, permanent workshops designed to encourage active participation by the community, people of all ages, families and schools. The installation also includes an arena designated for meeting, listening and reading texts that explore the galaxy of themes around Pedagogy of Hope.
The design of the platform is the result of a shared process that also involved children, adolescents and young people from 13 classes from schools of different levels and grades in the city and province of Bergamo in the months leading up to the opening. Through a series of workshops conceived by Fosbury Architecture and led by GAMeC educators, the male and female students explored meanings, interpretations and expressive possibilities related to the proposed themes, translating them into glyphs. These visual configurations, integrated into the space of Palazzo della Ragione and arranged on the black surface of the platform, reminiscent of the blackboard – an iconic element of school life -, will offer visitors the opportunity to experience new ways of exploration, of relating to others, to the historical architectural heritage and to the exhibition context.
In close dialogue with “Tabula Plena” and the workshop activities is the site-specific intervention by the artistic duo Claire Fontaine (Paris, 2004), which emphasizes reflection on the themes of knowledge, education and the influence that electronic devices and artificial intelligences exert on social relations and one’s view of the world. The installation consists of five suspended light sculptures that reproduce emoji. The Planet Earth sculptures depict three emoji offered by the digital vocabulary to represent as many visions of the interconnected and globalized world. The works, suspended over the heads of the participants, remind us that the world must always be looked at from multiple perspectives: the vision provided by screens, in fact, is not enough, because we are the ones who “create worlds” by weaving relationships charged with meaning. The smartphone, here stripped of its interactive dimension, constitutes an image of social isolation, but also of access to the world constantly mediated by the screen. Finally, the gift package introduces a reflection on desire and the logic of consumption. “Asking ourselves what gift we would all need today,” writes Claire Fontaine, “or what we really desire to give or receive, is not a trivial exercise, because it forces us to think about ourselves in relation to the giver or the receiver, and to ask ourselves what we can take away from monetary transactions to transform it into a gesture of free and beneficial love.”
Emoji are prefabricated drawings designed to express our emotions succinctly and with immediacy in digital communications. They are extremely familiar images, part of the everyday lexicon, which Claire Fontaine temporarily subtracts from the interactive flow of digital exchanges, transforming them into physical, three-dimensional, immobile objects: contemporary portraits of our social relations. The intervention is thus configured as an unlearning device, inviting us to unlearn established habits and acquired automatisms in order to open new spaces of critical awareness.
The Laboratories
The three permanent workshops, active and accessible free of charge throughout the duration of Tabula Plena, were co-designed with artists and individuals with expertise in educational and research practices. While adopting different approaches, they share a common goal: to question certainties, habits and established ways of learning, to value listening and process, and to return those who participate to an active role in the construction of knowledge.
The activity “36 Cards for Endless Forms,” designed with the Numero Cromatico collective, encourages the development of a critical look at some of the tools with which we interpret the world. Through the combination of a set of cards made available on magnetic boards, the and participants construct their own algorithmic configurations, becoming an active part of the cognitive process. The multiplicity of possible configurations highlights how algorithms are not predetermined, but human constructions resulting from strategic choices.
“Busillis,” the workshop created with Sabrina D’Alessandro’s URPS (Ufficio Resurrezione Parole Smarrite) works on subjective interpretation and imagination as forms of knowledge on par with traditional and institutional forms of knowledge from an archive of unusual objects and rare words. The personal narratives processed by the audience will be collected in an open and ever-changing collective sound archive, available for listening at the arena space.
“Let’s Talk about Education,” the activity developed together with Adelita Husni Bey, invites the questioning of a set of definitions of words that belong to the world of schooling and education in order to recognize and question their contradictions. The questions that guide reflection around the chosen words foster potentially transformative forms of critical thinking.
