The Reggio Emilia approach calls for the integration of the graphic arts as tools for cognitive, linguistic, and social development. Presentation of concepts and hypotheses in multiple forms of representation -- print, art, construction, drama, music, puppetry, and shadow play -- are viewed as essential to children's understanding of experience. Children have 100 languages...

Since the late ‘60s in the municipal preschools of Reggio Emilia, each school has a space called the atelier and the figure of the atelierista, an artist with a background in education. In this way, the expressive and poetic languages became part of the process by which knowledge is built. The Atelier thus becomes the place of research, invention, and empathy, expressed by means of “100 languages”, which extend beyond childhood to include adulthood up to advanced age.

Our exhibitions will document the learning processes of children and educators, and they aspire to be a forum for discussion, a sort of “democratic piazza”, a public place for promoting and discussing a new idea of childhood, education, and knowledge.

We aim to affirm the vital right to education and learning, to recognize the “hundred languages” as extraordinary potentials of all children, and of human beings in general, and to promote an idea of participated education.

All this as an impetus toward the construction of a new idea and a new experience of citizenship.