On Searching for the Antidote - Izzy Brittain

Clifton Green Primary School, Photo by Izzy Brittain, 2022

The sky is a peachy glow; a hot air balloon rises. Today is Day 1 of The Institute of Everything at Clifton Green Primary School. I’m here to curate and deliver a festival of creative care and recovery post-Covid. 

The Winter of Discontent looms, but the balloon is a positive omen - its slow float reminds me of the portals of possibility I’m here to invite. I dance through school doors wearing sunflower dungers and a determined smile.  

When curating this programme, I thought of my own younger years; the fleeting encounters with art and unusual ways of thinking. How they mushroomed, delivering me by radical diagonal towards a different life. 

I want to offer these kids a glimpse. 

Might curating this festival be an act of delicate activism? The co-creation of a micro-topia exploring radical kid-centric visions of the future? A portal of process, towards empowerment, embodiment, expansion? An artidote, perhaps? 

I’m beginning, as I often do, with a grand vision and a lot of questions. So, as ever, are the kids:

Hello sound recorder. Can you hear me? Plant more trees please! Dream of infinity! 

A crowd of seven-year-olds jostles around me. They’re firing questions with a curiosity and playfulness that delights. Later, they guess the identity of a globe artichoke – is it a cabbage, a microphone, maracas? What do you think about wombats anyway? 

Clifton Green Primary School, Photo by Coralie Datta, 2022

Many times, I’m dropped deliciously into awe when faced with the unboundedness of kids. They possess so much of the magic our world needs. A magic that can’t easily be monetised. 

I need no convincing to join a revolution of the smalls, the micro-organisms, the mycelial – led by seven-year-olds. Kid-topias for the win! Of course it all starts here, at the level of littlies.

Orienting toward the tiny, the primacy of the moment, offers a completely different way of being and knowing, and kids are masters of this. 

The Original Artists. Our future visionaries. We could learn a lot from them. 

The arc of the term focused on care for self, environment and other, moving primarily between three approaches; improvised movement and music, yoga and mindfulness, nature connection and tactile practices. A space to dream, sense, soften, dance, observe, draw, explore, ponder, rest. 

Sensorial development, body awareness, free movement, embodied imagery. Getting repeatedly drenched at Forest School. The ability to think, listen and feel through the body. To communicate intuitively and imaginally. 

Here we can taste freedom, imagineer and expand sensorial connectedness. We can only learn this experientially, away from desks, with hands in earth or clay, and nervous systems soothed by spaciousness.

Gentle, embodied play is a powerful antidote. Movement, music, nature connection and tactile practices embed us within a wider web of relations and senses. Yoga and mindfulness are precious tools of reconnection; to intimately know our own rhythms and nervous systems.

Unfortunately, time and space was limited at The Institute. We enjoyed a single term of Wednesdays together; each day a precious portal. We breathed deep, inhaling every experience, expansion of imagination and encounter with rain and sky. Because this is the stuff new worlds are made of.  

How can we help our world bend boundaries in the same elastic way a child’s mind would?

I left more convinced than ever that art can change the world, wondering; what would it look like to integrate kids into every aspect of life? How can we help our world bend boundaries in the same elastic way a child’s mind would? 

Imagine, a punk band of toddlers touring care homes, or ecologists and artists co-delivering outdoor intergenerational summer schools. How about public spaces designed by a team of urban-planning teenagers?

Art and education honouring past and future ancestors? Kids making friends with riverbeds through long-term engagement in an eco-centric education system? 

You know where I’m going with this. I’m a trans-disciplinary artist, interested in crossing borders and making space for dialogue. I enjoy everything interstitial. 

Huge gratitude Year 3, for showing me the way! 

I’ll leave you with another grand question or two…

What would a transdisciplinary, transgenerational, trans-species education system look like? And how might we attend to that vision with care, compassion and curiosity at heart? 

Suggestions on a postcard, please.