Support for an Exhibition of Children Drawings

Project location: Italy, Rome
Project start date: December 2010 - Project end date: February 2011
Project number: 2010-66
Beneficiary: Associazione Cuore Onlus per l’Infanzia

The goal of this project co-funded by the Nando Peretti Foundation is to draw attention to the messages that children send to adults through their drawings, that adults are not able to interpret without adequate knowledge. A thorough visit to the exhibition will enrich audience of those interpretative tools that Masal Pas Bagdadi has taken years to develop. Achievements of the project will be scientific, for example in the psychological therapy of children after traumatic experiences, and in the social field in order to educate the exhibition audience in understanding children.

The project goal is to organize an exhibition of children drawings in Rome, at Palazzo delle Esposizioni, from 29th November 2010 to 30 January 2011.

The project born from a fifty years experience of psychotherapeutic work of Doctor Masal Pas Bagdadi with children, teens and adults, and from the will to show how to know in deep emotions, mind, and thoughts of the children from two to twelve years old by their drawings and handwriting.
Doctor Masal decided then to tidy up the drawings, accumulated over the years in disorderly piles on her shelves, which had been left in her study by the many children that had been there. For the first time she examined them with a different approach, focussing her attention on their intrinsic beauty, and it seemed that they represented a pure form of art - essential and free from preconceived ideas.
Doctor Masal then had the idea of bringing them together in a book and subsequently in a show, to highlight the thoughts and emotions of children intent on questing for themselves through drawing.

"Chi sono io?" presents a selection of drawings by children aged between 2 and 12. Through their experimentation with graphics, these children are trying to understand their identity and shape their character. Although made up of children's drawings, the exhibition is aimed primarily at an adult public, in an attempt to explain how children think and feel as they grow up. In order to facilitate identification with these little artists on behalf of the visitors, a narrating voice will offer a kind of translation-interpretation of what the child was trying to express in the drawing.
The project is fully in line with the objectives of the Nando Peretti Foundation given that it has among its purposes the promotion of institutional programs for school education and welfare of children, medical and scientific research, to health, as well as art and culture. The project as well as having a strong cultural value and to be characterized by aspects related to the artistic beauty of the drawings of children is especially dedicated to the preservation of mental and physical health of the children themselves, as mentioned above, and aims to expand as far as possible, the audience of adults able to catch and treat the child discomfort.

The drawings of children aged 2 to 12 years are presented and interpreted so as to move the visitor's attention by the graphic sign to the message it conveys. The exhibition aims to give adult visitors the opportunity to closely follow the path that the child does, emotionally and intellectually in telling himself, up to the intuition of adult sexuality, mating, love and, above all , the aberrations that the child expresses and attempts to communicate when he is abused by adults. The project also intends to spread its message as much as possible by making itinerant, at a later time, the exhibition, bringing it if possible in several cities of Italy, as guests, from time to time, of schools, institutions or any entity is able to help us disseminate the basic tools of interpretation of infant communication.
The aim of the exhibition is running from city to city without boundaries, as the child's pictorial language is regardless of race, religion or country.
The exhibition wants to help adults to understand children psyche and to analyze scientifically the drawing as an artistic expression relating to children from all the world.

Cuore Onlus Association for Children was founded in 2001 in Rome, with the aim to promote the fund-raising for projects of solidarity and international cooperation for the benefit of abandoned children in the world.

Since the foundation it has helped in funding three projects:

• Christmas Concert 2003
• Christmas Concert 2002
• Project Tanzania - The Association participates in a distance support project "A class for adoption" for 30 children and supporting the cost of a school teacher in Manyioni (Singida Region), a town about 130 km from the capital of Tanzania, Dodoma .
• Summer camp in Italy for Russian children - The Association promoted the hosting of groups of children from the orphanages of Moscow are hosted during the summer in the seaside towns of Mondragone and Cesenatico, for periods ranging from fifteen days to a month.
• Documentation Centre Sister Giuliana Millico - Aim of this initiative, whose operations began in 2002, is the creation of cycles of training seminars for adoptive parents, volunteers and professionals in the field of international adoption.

Dr Masal Pas Bagdadi

Born in Damascus in Syria in 1938, she was just five years old when in the winter of 1943 she fled the anti-Semitic persecution along with many young Jews arriving in Palestine. The small Masal, after her arrival in the kibbutz in Israel, lived with anguish terrifying separation from the mother and the elder sister remained in Syria.
Masal grows in the kibbutz, where she can experience social and educational systems free and very advanced. His personal history makes her particularly able to empathize with people with emotional distress, and particularly with children. His psychoanalytic approach is creative and direct, and this allows her to "feel" the feelings, fears, feelings of his patients before they reach the real "diagnosis." The real secret of Masal success is her inner energy, her books, still very real, the result of years of work on hundreds of adults and children, her therapeutic sessions, her speeches, her interviews. Everything reveals a whole enormous vitality from which - as Masal says - "everyone can draw, when they seek help from me."
She's the author of numerous book on children's life and children's' education.




Associazione Cuore Onlus per l’Infanzia
Via Uffici del Vicario, 30
00186  Roma - Italy
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