The Secret School of Nature
About this Event
The Secret School of Nature
Arts workshop for kids 8–12 years old with Leila Fatemi
Inspired by Hicham Benohoud’s playful photographic interventions in The Classroom, participants will explore the grounds of The Riverwood Conservancy, using digital and Instax cameras to explore and transform the landscape into imaginative portraits and staged scenes. Through observation, collaboration, and experimentation, youth will discover how photography can be a tool to reshape how we see ourselves and the world around us.
No prior experience with photography is necessary. Snacks will be served.
Presented in partnership with Visual Arts Mississauga.
Leila Fatemi (b. 1991, Milan) is a contemporary visual artist currently based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Through a combination of material and textual research, her practice unfolds across a variety of mediums including photography, collage, archival materials, textile, pattern and printmaking. Bridging themes of postcolonialism, gender, and spirituality, Fatemi's work challenges viewers to consider their role in relation to the representational accuracy and cultural consequences of Orientalized subjects. Her work offers alternative perspectives surrounding the colonial gaze, ethnic representation, and collective numinous experiences by employing methods of subversion and reclamation as tools to resist imperialist legacies.
Accessibility
Visual Arts Mississauga is a physically accessible building. Parts of this event will take place outdoors on paved and gravel paths.
The Classroom Public Programming
An event series on experimental education, movement, and creative pedagogy
Co-curated by Fraser McCallum and Jacqui Usiskin
Rooted in is an invitation to enact alternative modes of learning amid educational austerity that erodes access, experimentation, and critical inquiry. Running alongside the lightbox exhibition, a four-part program series heeds this call throughout the summer. Led by guest contributors whose research spans performance, anthropology, critical disability studies, and social justice education, this program animates reflexive, embodied, and community-sustaining pedagogies. Sessions will foreground culture-rooted practices and plural forms of knowledge-making, engaging choreography, accessibility, illustration, storytelling, dance, and photography as tools for shared learning and artmaking. As in Benohoud’s Classroom, learning will unfolding through collective inquiry, dialogue, and play.
Visit our website for full program descriptions and contributor biographies.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
CAD 0.00
