Metaphor: Creating new ways to touch, speak and see the world #2

Here is the second of our seminars on Metaphor, by Viviana Fiorentino. It is not necessary for you to have participated in the first one, but the material does follow (it is not a repeat.)

In the festive intuition of metaphors, we pack our mental goods down into tight, neat bundles, we load them as carefully as we can into the ‘metafora truck’ of languages; it drives from me to you, and then we unpack. A fundamental part of the process of metaphors is communicating and empathy: a circular process that builds the bond between each other, between us, adults, and children, between child and child, adult and adult, human being and human being. This territory is rich of possibilities, trust, open, a new ground we explore re-inventing together names of everything around.

a metaphor truck

We will explore the metaphors through the perspective of poetry and art as a way of imaging and exploring the world. Thanks to the “metaphor attitude”, we will investigate what is possible and what is impossible, how many possibilities we have as citizens to rethink the world around us for a better society.

The seminar will encourage you to put yourself in the state of creating metaphors leading to unusual, unexpected procedures that children spontaneously use. We will talk about how and what children do and of the use of metaphors as fundamental bridge between (what we believe is) the world of adulthood and the world of childhood.

This seminar is designed to inform the current Sightlines Initiative early childhood pedagogy action-research project into Visual Metaphor.

It will also be pertinent to all who are interested in the ways in which adults tune in to young children’s thinking and learning.

It is free to Sightlines Initiative subscribers. If you are not currently subscribed to our network it is easy to so do, and will enable you to register. SUBSCRIBE

Viviana Fiorentino was born and grew up in southern Italy. After achieving her Doctorate, travelled across Europe, from Switzerland to Germany, England and finally Belfast where she now lives, writing novels and poetry, teaching Italian literature, and leading creative writing workshops for cultural minorities.
In 2018, she was awarded two Italian poetry prizes. Her poems have appeared in literature blogs and international magazines. A selection of her poems is published in ‘Writing Home: the New Irish poets’. In 2019, she published a poetry collection in Italy and her first novel.
She has been involved in many different festivals, poetry readings and projects, such as the 2019. ‘Sky, you are too big’, which revolved around the themes of travelling, migration and displacement.
She is in the editorial staff of Carteggi Letterari (Italian periodical Lit magazine) with the column ‘Neither here, nor there’ and she periodically writes for the magazine TerreLibere about migration and politics.