PRIMARY FORMS

Dear friends!

We don’t know each other, but we’ll meet soon. We’ve prepared a box of surprises for you. We’re sure it will bring you much joy and keep you from getting bored!

The box you’ve just opened contains an art exhibition. It’s not ready yet, and you will be the ones to put it together. This will require some patience and work, and the effects may vary a lot. Do things your own way. Each small box contains a set of objects that will help you complete one of the tasks prepared by a group of artists. Art means a lot of different things! You will discover this by unpacking the parcel.

All the objects you’ll find here have been prepared especially for you. The exhibition that these objects form can be shown in the classroom, corridor, gym hall, basement, cloakroom, or perhaps even outside the school building? One thing is sure, you won’t see this exhibition in any museum in the world.

You’ll find instructions below that will tell you what to do with the contents of each cardboard box.

Whatever happens, write to us, to the Museum. You might want to send a message to the artists whose works you’ve found in the box? There are postcards inside with a stamp and the Museum’s address. It’s enough to write your message and throw one into the postbox. We promise to answer every letter!

We hope it’s just the beginning of our acquaintance and many adventures await us.

Do it yourself! Or let’s do it together!

Sebastian and Helena

Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw

Alphabet

The alphabet is one of the most amazing inventions of humankind: several dozen simple signs are enough for us to share virtually every thought and emotion, and what we write may survive for thousands of years. But we know all too well that sometimes the alphabet alone does not suffice – not everything can be expressed with it as intended. Artists frequently seek to extend the available repertoire of signs, search for new uses of the alphabet and construct new languages to express what matters to them.

hu hu

        hu

        hu

krrro

  krrro

                krrro

       tu tu tu

            tu tu tu tu hu ha hu

– recited the Serbian poet Katalin Ladik. She considered paper, the traditional medium of poetry, as too static and replaced it with her own body. The artist deprived words of their meanings, returning to the mechanical function of letters as a record of sounds. Her poetic performances transformed the alphabet and the language of written poetry into music and choreography. She prolonged vowels, repeated consonants, called new words into being, which seemed to come directly out of the bowels, throat, mouth.

The alphabet was also deconstructed by the Polish artist Ewa Partum. In her video Active Poetry. Poem by Ewa, agency over language is given to wind and water. Partum scatters letters in the wind and thrusts them onto waves, which form new words. She chose to liberate the alphabet from rigid rules and allow chance to take control over language. When invited to London’s Tate Modern in 2006 for a re-enactment of the piece, she scattered letters from James Joyce’s Ulysses in the gallery’s most famous space, the Turbine Hall. Children who came to the exhibition with their parents immediately began to collect the letters and arrange them as they pleased. When asked not to touch them by the museum staff, they rebelled and cried. Their parents eventually complained to the director of Tate Modern that the artist was disturbing the children. They approached the alphabet as a common good. After all, everyone has the right to use language and form words. Chitty-chat you old chap, you better GTB. Buh-bye!

(Kuba Depczyński)

Break

Pause, break, slit in time, digestion, fermentation, imagination, listening, immersion, contamination. Interval as room for that which is possible, as the creation of the conditions for something new to happen.

Break – a welcome moment of catching your breath, carefreeness and fun. It is usually understood as a moment of freedom from the rigour of lessons, activities and duties. But perhaps it is exactly the other way round: schools exist only for the sake of breaks and genuine learning doesn’t take place in the classroom, but in the corridor, sports field and schoolyard? 

In 2015, two Brazilian artists, Tainá Azeredo and Cláudio Bueno, founded Intervalo-Escola, which means “school break”. It does not have a permanent location, but rather appears unexpectedly in various places and institutions. Nor does it have a fixed curriculum – this school is all about never-ending breaks, during which every person can suggest the next fun activity. Knowledge produced at Intervalo Escola is generated by all of its participants, who decide themselves what they want to do together and how. The artists emphasise that according to their educational model opportunities for learning together do not arise during lessons, but during relaxation, cooking and eating, naps, casual conversations, walks, games and fun.

Perhaps we also need to take a break from museums and art? 

For many artists a break turned out to be the most important lesson. The American artist and poet Peter Nadin decided to take a break from art in 1992. He stopped exhibiting his works and moved out of the city. He bought a farm from the early 19th century located on the outskirts of New York City and began breeding pigs, chickens, ducks, goats and bees. Although during that time he stayed away from museums, galleries, critics and curators, he soon realised that farmer’s work was also a precious and edifying form of art. Inspired by this discovery, he transformed his farm into the quasi-institution Old Field Farm/Art & Agriculture, which engaged in agricultural and artistic production. Inspired by his farming experience, Nadin’s current works are often made using materials from the farmstead, such as cashmere wool and beeswax. In 2006, he published the book The First Mark: Unlearning How to Make Art.

(Bogna Stefańska)

Climate

If we were to leave school familiar with just one topic, it should be climate. Human-induced planetary changes: global warming, rising sea and ocean levels, extinction of species, destruction of ecosystems, disturbed circulation of chemical elements in nature, will determine how life is lived on Planet Earth for hundreds, if not thousands of years to come. The response of our and the next generations of Homo sapiens to the question of climate, natural environment and ecology will decide whether we can adapt to these changes in any measure and reduce their negative consequences or else experience them as a series of disasters beyond control.

The problematics of climate change abounds in contradictions and paradoxes – global warming is a process too vast and massively distributed in time for us to see and grasp it in its entirety. At the same time, however, we experience it directly with every drop of acid rain and PM 2.5 dust particles suspended in the air. On the one hand, it demonstrates the incredible agency of humans, who, after all, affect the functioning of the entire planet. On the other hand, we all feel helpless in its face and efforts towards reducing it appear pitiful. The complexity of climate crisis compels us to change everything at the same time: politics and lifestyle, economy and values, individual and social behaviour, language and imagination.

We can learn what to do in the face of climate change from the Indian engineer and educator Sonam Wangchuk, who gained renown for his work in the Ladakh region. Inhabitants of this high-altitude and desert region are stricken with ever more severe droughts caused by global warming. In order to tackle the water crisis, Wangchuk and his team began raising ice stupas in Ladakh to store frozen water in the form of conical shaped ice heaps. It does not take complex technology to build them, just a skilful use of the force of gravity and local differences in temperature. Melting slowly, the stupas provide the people of Ladakh with water during long rainless months. What’s more, as more than a dozen metres high ice sculptures set in the middle of the desert, they make beautiful and Surreal artworks.

Wangchuk realises that his efforts are not enough to cope with climate change across the planet. That’s why he has engaged in educational activities for years. He creates new curricula for schools and universities and sets up his own institutions that place emphasis on sustainable, ecological and environmental education. Who knows, perhaps the construction of ice stupas will soon be embraced in the core curriculum of Polish schools?

(Bogna Stefańska)

Collective Action

Some people take great satisfaction from collective action. It allows for sharing resources, learning from each other and developing competence in group work and self-organisation. Does modern-day school offer opportunities for collective action other than team sports played in PE classes? Could the gym hall host lessons resembling group investigations into movement pursued at the beginning of the 1970s by Steve Paxton, one of the founders of the dance technique called contact improvisation? How would Game on Morel’s Hill unfold on the school pitch – the “visual manoeuvres” initiated by the artist duo KwieKulik between the participants of the Young Creative Workshop in Elbląg in 1971?

In Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s work, community-forming artistic activities happened in a specific place, which for many artists became something of a school. That place was the Halprin residence designed by the architect, urban planner and ecologist Lawrence Halprin in Kentfield, California. A dance terrace built on a woody slope for the choreographer Anna Halprin became a site of improvisations based on assigned tasks as well as movement rituals. It hosted workshops devoted to art, healing and social change conducted with a multiracial community.

Modern-day school seeks to keep up with trends in education. Teachers ever more often organise classes outside the school building, combining the acquisition of knowledge about the surrounding world with experiments and the use of technology. But there is more to collaboration and collective creative work than simply gaining more knowledge as they foster empathy, develop emotional intelligence, creativity and the sense of agency, which are indispensable at every stage of child’s development.

Group activity can result from a spontaneous and ephemeral initiative, as in some street actions in urban space by the Polish experimental theatre and artistic collective Akademia Ruchu [Academy of Movement]. It can be done without a leader, as in the case of the New York collective of choreographers and dancers that functioned from 1962 to 1964 in a space of interdisciplinary exchange at Judson Memorial Church, from which the collective took its name: Judson Dance Theater.

Artists from the circles of Akademia Ruchu and Judson postulated communality and egalitarian interpersonal relations. They created collaborative improvisations that addressed everyday life and relied on the corporeality of performers’ bodies, and their methods grew directly out of counterculture and participatory forms of social protest: marching, taking over urban space, sit-ins. Nowadays, a similar political sensibility informs the actions of the School Strike for Climate, which began as a group of high school students and developed into a dynamic social movement that taps into the performativity of protest and social media to manifest emotions, express opposition and formulate scenarios for the future.

(Alicja Czyczel)

Colour / Theory of colour 

It is not what the eye catches mechanically that matters in the process of seeing, but the consciousness man has of his seeing – claimed the Polish avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński in his Theory of Vision.

Not only people see colours. Dogs and cats can best see yellow and blue. Birds see ultraviolet. Reptiles see infrared, and many mammals are colour blind, unable to make out the difference between green and red. However, as theory of colour posits, colour is just a subjective mental impression generated in the brain of the observer, such as a human being or an animal.

Investigating various ways, possibilities and limitations related to colour perception, the Vietnamese collective Art Labor combined art and science in their project The Adventure of Color Wheel at the Pediatrics Department of the Eye Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Art Labor fused their discoveries with artistic imagination in their design of colour solutions for the hospital and a series of murals. On the ceiling of the main entrance hall they installed revolving letters E, which look like abstract paintings while testing the vision of illiterate individuals. In turn, in the halls of the Pediatrics Department, patients’ eyes can follow wall graphic pieces with thousands of colourful wheels and painterly depictions of imagined landscapes. The hospital’s new interiors not only relax and fascinate young patients, but also offer a useful tool for a range of diagnostic tests.

Artists can also find concentration on colours soothing. In the 1970s, the Polish artist Andrzej Szewczyk sought to escape painting and tiresome challenges of creative work in every possible way. In this he resorted to the most radical means: he denied himself the possibility of using artistic imagination and the very idea of creation. Instead, he embarked on covering the pages of children’s colouring books with primary colours, strictly following attached models and instructions. Szewczyk stated: “For the first time I rejected all artistic, aesthetic and non-aesthetic dilemmas, and questions about all these values became groundless for me.” 

(Bogna Stefańska)

Experiment

1. A scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery, test a hypothesis, or demonstrate a known fact.

2. A course of action tentatively adopted without being sure of the outcome.

– Oxford English Dictionary

Experimenting is one of the most enjoyable and attractive methods of learning. When we experiment, something finally happens, and dull exercises from school textbooks materialise in front of our very eyes: cress does really grow on cotton wool, reagents in phials and beakers change their colour, and a beam of life passing through a slit behaves like a wave. It is such experiments that allow for investigating the phenomena around us.

Experimenting is also one of the most pleasurable and interesting ways of making art. Artists who experiment do not focus on the pursuit of a specific premeditated effect, but on the very process of putting their idea into practice. They specify initial conditions, set creative machinery in motion and observe what happens. What will happen if they hang canvasses in the forest, exposing them to rain, mudslides and encounters with animals? What will happen if they write a score of a musical piece by throwing a dice? What will a film look like that consists of nothing but sunset scenes?

We could try to fuse biology, physics and chemistry lessons with art and art history classes into a single experimental subject. This is how many artists work, for example the Cooking Sections duo, who experimented with using artworks as innovative tools to tackle drought in Sicily. In collaboration with agronomists from the local university, they built three scientific-artistic installations resembling minimalist sculptures to water citrus trees in Palermo, a city engulfed by water crisis. Built of clay water pipes and bricks and colourful mesh made of a material designed specifically for this purpose, the structures generated a unique microclimate that enabled plants to absorb water directly from cool humid air. The installations and trees were connected to sensors measuring the parameters of the microclimate and its influence on plants. The gathered data was published both on site and online, which allowed the audience to monitor the course of the experiment in real time. The experiment conducted by Cooking Sections ultimately turned out successful both as a watering device and as an artwork devoted to water crisis.

(Bogna Stefańska & Kuba Depczyński)

Fooling Around

Laughter is contagious. When caused by positive feelings, it can release superfluous tension from our bodies, offer a sense of relief and uplifting joy (endorphins!). As in Antonia Baehr’s performance Laugh, in which the artist performs laughter outside its usual context in an aural form, like a musical score, and the audience cannot help but spontaneously burst out laughing.

Joke has a special place at school, it may be glued to a colleague’s backs, noted down in notebook margins, drawn on benches and the blackboard, posted on TikTok and shared as a meme. It is accompanied by choreographies of furtive gestures, winks and data flows.

Laughter can also carry subversive content – it may become a commentary that ridicules and denounces undesired attitudes, phenomena and actions, as well as a tool of critique of the value system and authorities. This happened in dance and cabaret performances by the avant-garde dancer, pantomimist and actress Valeska Gert, which relied on the mimical expression of emotions and expressiveness of the body to challenge bourgeois morality and mores of the era.

Discerning comic qualities in people and situations may foster community formation. Fooling around at school integrates the group and may offer a moment of liberation from disciplining the bodies of pupils, who sit in rows of benches from an early age and silently carry out tasks assigned by their teachers. Loud untamed laughter engages the whole body and oxygenates the organism.

Experimental pedagogy and alternative education pay considerable attention to pupils’ individual interests, talent, needs, and to developing their social competences without excessive supervision, grading and textbooks. Learning is accompanied by physical activities, games, trips, conversations, rest and fun, which help absorb knowledge. Sitting on the floor, murmuring, walking around the classroom, fidgeting on a chair – this is exactly what some of us need to learn better and enjoy it.

(Alicja Czyczel) 

Foreign languages

Do we really learn foreign languages at school? It would seem so at first glance; after all, school timetables are full of Spanish, French, German and even Latin classes. In reality, we learn a certain “language” on every lesson: body language in PE classes, language of literature in English classes, language of art in art classes, language of science in biology and chemistry classes. Although we don’t always understand them, these languages can hardly be recognised as genuinely “foreign”. After all, each was created and is used by representatives of the Homo sapiens species.

The Korean artist Kim Beom has been thinking for many years about ways to include the non-human world into the education process. In his works, the roles of students are played by various objects: the artist lectures a stone on the beauty of poetry, explains to a ship in a bottle what the sea is, and clarifies the difference between a human being and an object to a plastic watering can. Despite the efforts, the disciples remain completely indifferent and insensitive to the languages of literature, biology, physics and history. Beom shows that although we learn a lot at school about humans and the reality they have created, we unlearn contact with the non-human world at the same time. Paradoxically, the more human we become, the more difficult we find it to communicate with what surrounds us.

The world abounds in non-human languages. Water and air, flowers and rocks, cats and dogs, mushrooms and trees hold an ongoing conversation, and we don’t understand a thing! Nobody taught us at school how to communicate with a boulder or an amphibian, or even how to derive joy from mutual incomprehension. Can we imagine what learning a “foreign language” could look like? Beom dropped us some hints in his book The Art of Transforming, published in 1997:

How to Become a Rock

Choose an appropriate spot.

A spot with more stones around is recommended. Assume a low position – sitting or lying, but in harmony with the surroundings.

Freeze still and stop breathing.

Don’t think about anything, care neither about the season nor the weather. Don’t allow anything to grab your attention, not even a storm or another cataclysm. Don’t pay attention even if you’re about to fall down from your spot. Don’t worry and keep your position.

Even if moss has grown on a patch of soil near you or worms are building their nests, don’t destroy them, leave them alone.

(Kuba Depczyński)

Imagination

We learn a lot at school about facts from the past: what happened, where and when, who conquered whom, where borders ran, which year a given poem or book was penned. We find out a bit about how it is: what an animal cell consists of, how modern-day English grammar works, where copper deposits are located in our country, the difference between the European Parliament and the Council of Europe. However, we are told less about how it will be: about what is approaching, about the world we will inhabit in ten or twenty years. But does school teach us at all about how it could be?

According to many contemporary thinkers, the greatest crisis we’re facing today is the crisis of imagination. Philosophers, scientists and artists warn us that we’ve lost the crucial ability to imagine reality anew. To create new worlds. To formulate previously unknown narratives and visions. Today, even the boldest and most radical proposals for change seem rather down-to-earth and not far-removed from what we already know. The only solution we’re able to come up with when faced with such problems as climate change, rampant social inequalities or the crisis of democracy is “business as usual”. In order to really tackle them head-on, we need to go beyond how it used to be, how it is and how it will be. We need to imagine how it could be.

Using your imagination is something that can be learnt and developed through art. Active in the 1960s, artists, activists and theorists affiliated with the Situationist International believed that we could begin training our imagination simply by walking around the city. They developed their own method of casual urban strolling, which they called drift (la dérive). It’s simple: when drifting one should avoid familiar paths, beaten tracks and conventional routes, allowing oneself instead to be attracted by the ambiances of individual districts and places, to follow surprising hints and embrace unexpected encounters and plot twists.

Situationists perceived drifting, which set imagination free, as the first step towards changing the world. What would a city look like if it wasn’t organised around efficient thoroughfares, shopping malls and tourist landmarks? A city that would act as a source of joy of aimless strolls, enable the experience of a variety of ambiances and constantly surprise and stimulate the imagination of its dwellers? What would their daily life look like? And their culture? How would their society be organised?

(Kuba Depczyński)

Library

The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the school library is a nostalgic atmosphere and volumes giving out a dusty smell, arranged in orderly rows, in alphabetical order. Is this the only use of library resources? What else can be done with books?

When asked if he read books, the British artist John Latham might have replied: I devour them. In 1966, Latham and a group of his students subjected to a literal and metaphorical “test of taste” their much-loathed book by the renowned American art critic Clement Greenberg. The group tore it into tiny pieces, which they later chewed and spat out. The chewed remnants were carefully collected and left to ferment. When Latham received his overdue notice from the library at Saint Martin’s School of Art, he returned a phial with the chewed content. That gesture cost him his teaching post. That was how the piece Still and Chew. Art and Culture 1966–1967 came into being, which currently belongs to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Latham frequently used books in his work – he cut out their fragments, glued them together, covered them with plaster and paint or burnt them. He created cycles of “skoob” works, that is “books” written backwards. In 1991, he worked with the most significant books in the history of humankind in God is Great, a conceptual piece comprising copies of the Bible, the Quran and a volume of the Talmud, each cut in half and bonded to a glass panel. But Latham was not a butcher of the printed word. A recurring motif in his art is the power of books, which takes the viewer away from the physical world and into the spiritual sphere or imagined universes.

A similar use for books was found by Marcel Broodthaers. After twenty years of attempts to become a successful poet, in 1963 he chose to become an artist and began creating objects. He commemorated that moment of symbolical passage by squeezing fifty unsold copies of his volume of poetry into plaster. Thus, he created his first art object. Broodthaers described the difference between poetry and art with irony: “Finally the idea of inventing something insincere crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway. At the end of three months I showed what I had produced to Philippe Edouard Toussaint, the owner of the Galerie St Laurent. ‘But it is art’, he said, ‘and I will willingly exhibit all of it.’ What is it? In fact, objects.”

(Kuba Depczyński)

The Passage and Measurement of time

Time at public schools is measured in precise units marked by a sound signal – the school bell. Each lesson lasts 45 minutes, each break – 15 minutes. One must not be late and confuse time for learning with time for rest, eating, fun. Meticulous measurement of time spent in the school bench is accompanied by reflection that learning takes considerable time, including free time, which needs to be devoted to doing your homework and preparing for tests. What attitude to being in time, its passing and transience does school shape in us? How do we think about spending time together and how about our individual sense of time? Do we talk about the fact that some people need more time for certain tasks and activities than others? Are we able to accept it and do we find a language to describe it? Instead of “competing”, “outdoing each other in progress at school”, “winning” and replicating the CPF cycle (“cram, pass, forget”), can we, as the school community, create time and space for slowing down, learning from our own mistakes, getting bored, losing ourselves in something and building interpersonal relations?

Contemporary art offers inspiration and tools for experiencing and making use of time in more creative and emancipatory ways. Even at the museum, where discipline is maintained, where we behave according to mastered rules and remain under supervision, an encounter with a work of art can become an opening intellectual and sensual experience.

In the 1970s, Tehching Hsieh, an artist of Taiwanese origin, began a series of performances in New York that lasted for a year. During one of them, Time Clock Piece (One Year Performance 1980–1981), he punched a time clock every hour on the hour, engaging himself physically and mentally in this demanding and exhausting performative action, which left a trace in the form of video documentation.

In 1977, the artist duo Marina Abramović and Ulay spent sixteen hours in the gallery. They sat with their backs against each other, their hair tied together, surrounded only by gallery employees, who documented the process. After a dozen or so hours, when the duo was very close to exhaustion, the audience was allowed into the gallery, which compelled Abramović and Ulay to treat the viewers’ presence as an energy boost and extend the performance by one hour.

A totally different approach, focussed less on expressing intensity and liminal experience and more on details and the impression of time becoming denser, is used in her performances by the choreographer Maria Hassabi. Staging from 2017 is a piece presented at museums and galleries which combines choreography for a group of performers, light and sound installation, and an enormous pink carpet. Movement composed in a loop develops extremely slowly and lasts as long as the opening times of the institutions that hosts it. We may therefore leave the museum in the morning and come back in the evening to find out that the performers, akin to snails, have only moved to the other end of the room, renouncing the spectacular for the sake of change, mindfulness and continuity. Never pressed for time.

(Alicja Czyczel)

Practice/ Excercise

The acquiring of knowledge and skills – the education system as a whole – is based on constant practice. We practise by repeating, copying texts, drawing, completing tasks and doing homework. Children at school practise in order to absorb the core curriculum. Artists at the academy practise to master a given medium.

Classes held at the experimental Black Mountain College in the 1930s under the supervision of Josef Albers consisted in famous exercises in interaction of colour. Students used paint to combine colours in different configurations and thereby to understand their specificity and the way they influenced each other. Exercises adopted a much more spontaneous and polyphonic form in Creativity Exercises created in 1975 by Miklós Erdély and Dóra Maurer, an amateur art course held at Budapest’s Ganz-MAVAG factory. Combining various disciplines and introducing movement, music, acting, film and photography in their exercises, Erdély and Maurer founded them on participation, group action and the practice of imitation. An exemplary exercise: one person covers themselves with a piece of fabric and assumes a most complicated pose. The other participants try to guess and assume the same pose. The concealed person may be additionally represented in a visual form. The idea behind the exercise was to develop creativity and a collective creative process.

However, practice does not always necessarily mean progress. What if an exercise led to unlearning instead of learning? Unlearning Exercises is a research project run by the artist Annette Krauss in collaboration with the Casco Art Institute. It is based on exercises devised for art institutions with the goal of unlearning conventional ways of thinking. A fixation with immediacy and growth is replaced by a process of gradual change oriented to the culture of equality and community. One of the exercises consists in achieving balance together in a group by holding each other’s arms while sitting in a circle on chairs and balancing on two legs; another is based on cooking and tidying together. Krauss’ exercises challenge the normative mode of learning and the institutionalisation of knowledge. Regardless of the goal it serves, practice is said to make perfect.

(Helena Czernecka) 

School desk

We spend hundreds of hours at them. We know their every detail. Just as we stare at traces left by those before us, we also like to leave something behind. A cut? A drawing? A signature? The school desk is a collective amassment of signs and traces left by pupils. It is a testimony to time spent on learning, but also on dreaming and fantasising. Boredom and moments of oblivion, to which scribbles on the desk testify, appear to be part and parcel of knowledge acquisition.

The sociological potential of the analysis of drawings made on school desktops by absent-minded children during classes became an inspiration for the artist Petrit Halilaj. In his series Abetare he made use of drawings on desktops in his own primary school in the town of Runik in Kosovo, which he preserved on an enlarged scale by means of steel rods. Having chosen those spontaneous drawings, featuring such motifs as hearts, houses, birds, flowers, cars, airplanes, rockets and weapons, Halilaj examined the relation between the personal and the universal, documenting the desires, hopes and anxieties of several generations of children and teenagers.

The escapist power of a drawing made on the school desktop, which allows a child’s imagination to liberate itself from the rigid frames of school classes and the institutional surroundings, also inspired the project Frequencies by the Colombian artist Oscar Murillo. Since 2013, he archived more than 40,000 thousand canvasses that had previously been installed on desktops at schools worldwide. Scribbles and drawings, signatures, football team logos, images of famous people, hearts, skulls and dozens of other motifs bear testimony to the widespread need to oppose the school’s normative surroundings; they speak to the desire for freedom and liberty in making youthful fantasies come true.

(Helena Czernecka)