Learning to Play with the Rules

On the Development of the Bauspielplatz Kunst Kammer’s Methodological Play with Variation

Authors

• Marc Herbst TransArt Institute

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54916/rae.119564

Keywords:

adventure playground,, climate change, transformational play, play, eco-social play, arts-based research, refugees, integration, childhood learning, urban planning, social variation, institutional variation, play museum, museums, art pedagogy

Abstract

With social and ecological variation caused by climate change, cities and city residents will need to develop flexibility at the core of their structures and in
their relationships to them. Cities’ planning codes, design norms and their residents’ food and comfort habits are established upon Holocenic stability that
has been upended by the Anthropocene. So, in addition to the routine socialization that children must undertake to learn to live together in their established settings, they must now learn to embrace flexible relations to these settings and their habits. European life is now transforming with changes driven by climate change and recent refugee waves, and Germany responded to the 2015 wave by generously funding cultural integration projects with loosely defined goals. When properly situated, arts-based learning can provide a playful way for children, refugee or not, to flexibly integrate and relate to each other and to changes in cultural and architectural infrastructure towards heterogeneous conviviality. This practice-based paper describes an artistic researcher’s development of an arts-based situation, the Bauspielplatz Kunst Kammer (BKK) museum, intended for such learning. It discusses initial insights into the practice of how a situated institution can ground such learning and looks towards wider questions such a project inspires.