Nieves19 juni 2009 – 11:18

‘As western societies are richer nowadays than ever before, people don’t need to use fantasy. If you need something, you buy it’, said Jiri Wald. He and his wife are the curators of this project also known as 'The Gate to the World of Creative Human Imagination'.

‘When I was born, after the Second World War, I had just one toy: a car that I always repaired and treated as my baby. My children, however, had twenty toy cars and they were broken and thrown away very often.’

In his opinion, parents should be more creative with children, reading books or fairy tales to stimulate their imagination, and encouraging their contact with Nature. ‘There are a lot of children in Europe that think that cows are lilac because Milka cows are painted in that colour on the billboards. So we must encourage children to interact with real life. That’s also the aim of this exhibition. Come and touch, play with them, let your fantasy make something…’

The exhibition, which had already visited France, Italy, the Czech Republic and Canada before arriving in Brussels, will be open until the 23rd of June and during the Couleur Café Festival.

‘Those objects were touched by millions of hands and nothing has been damaged’, said Wald. ‘That means that is a different energy compared to computers or video games. We’re manipulated by advertising. But I believe that Art can change people. It is beautiful and has the energy of the artist inside, so people are not so brutal’.

The ideas of this exhibition are rooted in the work of J. A. Comenius, the famous Czech humanist and teacher and specifically in his book 'Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart'. According to Wald, the book is a metaphor for life, as useful nowadays as it was four centuries ago. Comenius focused on Culture and Art as the tools that nations and people need to understand each other.