Migratory Nest is a multi-day workshop born from the encounter between Talking Hands and the educational services of the Palladio Museum. Embracing the idea of an open museum, the Palladio Museum had developed a program titled "Palladio breaks down museums," bringing architecture and other visual languages to children from peripheral neighborhoods of the city with few or no opportunities to visit the museum.
In the case of Migratory Nest, the context was the summer camp organized within the institution. The project arose from the desire to tell the story of migratory phenomena - extended movements of animals, people, ideas, and architectural forms - to a group of children aged between 6 and 11 years. It was decided to limit the explicit information of the narrative to the cyclical movement, northward and southward, that migratory birds make every year in search of warmer and more welcoming places, and to their extraordinary ability to orient themselves by following safe routes across continents and oceans. After identifying the most significant aspects of the phenomenon, together with the museum staff, we assembled maps, aerial photographs, and videos in a presentation to share and discuss with the children at the first meeting.
In parallel, we designed 4 types of nests and created assembly kits so that each child could compose their own independently. Besides the assembly of wooden elements, each nest was to be decorated with colored patterns using water-based paints. The graphic make-up intervention was coordinated by Sheriffo Darboe, a Gambian artist and asylum seeker who, with a live demonstration, taught the children how to create polychrome geometric patterns with the simple use of paper tape and brushes.
The idea of creating a series of micro-architectures to hang on trees or houses to offer resting areas for migratory birds seemed functional to the story of how humans, just like birds (actually, even more than them), possess an extraordinary capacity to adapt to different environments and react to the transformations and dangers of the place where they live by moving, changing their habits, and absorbing new cultures. To emphasize the high symbolic value of the nest, understood both as the original home and as a temporary refuge, and the importance of expanding one's cultural coordinates by knowing other cultures, professionals from different places were involved in the phases of creating the birdhouses.
At the end of the workshop, a colorful procession of children, accompanied by us, reached a city park and hung the nests on the trees. In this way, the initiative had public visibility, the creativity of the design left the place designated for it, contributing to enhancing an otherwise neglected urban environment, and above all, offering new and practical nests to the passing birds.
