gleichstark
Description
"gleichstark" (equally strong) is an interactive draft for an exhibiton for children and their companions. The exhibition is conceived as an modular travelling exhibition and can be used by schools, associations and organisations.What is the Topic?
The exhibition is based on a gender-sensitive pedagogy that can be experienced indirectly and playfully. "gleichstark" draws attention to the influences of gender on our everyday lives and how children grow up, and invites us to rethink, question, and reinterpret gender.
Why does it look like this?
Since "gleichstark" is planned as a traveling exhibition, the exhibition modules are easy to assemble and disassemble and transportable in a transporter. It takes place in gyms as most schools and many potential interested parties have access to and contact with gyms and as they offer many advantages: they are usually easily accessible by public transport, offer sufficient exhibition space, are already part of the everyday reality of children and provide resources that I use in my concept. In order to keep the transport effort low, exercise mats with covers are used as a station area. These assign a space to each station and give the exhibition a structure. For the stations, care was taken to use an easily legible font and to reduce the amount of text to the bare minimum. The design of the stations invites you to discover them and encourages young and old to join in and try them out.
What is special?
Gender-sensitive pedagogy is usually aimed at parents and adults. "gleichstark", however, introduces the children themselves to the topic. Since the exhibition is aimed primarily at children of primary school age, they are introduced to the topic in a playful manner and are rather made indirectly aware of how gender influences their socialization. In a mutual exchange with peers and adults, thoughts, feelings and consequences can be discussed and awareness can be created. By observing and interacting with the children, the adults can see what effects gender has on them and are invited to read the background information on the individual stations in a booklet.
What is new?
"gleichstark" brings a complex topic, which is otherwise only aimed at adults, to the actual target group, the children, and creates a thematic space at eye level between young and old. Because the topic is very quickly perceived as an affront to one's own upbringing and personal value system and generates polarizing opinions, it was important to me not to swing the sledgehammer of the gender discussion but to slowly introduce the adults to the topic through observation and interaction and to spotlight the actual addressees of the topic (children).