Why? (Place Your Ear to the Ground and Tell Me What You Hear), 2022

Dirt, speakers, pirate radio station, question marks made by preschool teachers out of everyday materials, giant index cards (3m x 1.5m), and cushions.

“Why? (Put your ear down to the earth and tell me what you hear)” was a project done in collaboration with Konsthall C and educators Birgitta Adolfsson and Malin Dahlberg, on the invitation of Ulrika Flink. Konsthall C has an ongoing collaboration with the local municipality called Art in Preschool.  Over fifty preschool pedagogues and five hundred five-year-olds in Stockholm, Sweden participated. 

The project used the fairy tale Warum (1922) written by Austrian leftist children’s author Hermynia Zur Mühlen (1883-1951) as a starting point to engage children in conversations about the nature of reality and society. The story Warumcenters an inquisitive young orphan named Paul. Paul is constantly getting into trouble for asking “why?’ certain things are the way they are in society. But everyone he meets dismisses his questions as trivial and annoying. One day he comes across a dryad in a birch tree in a forest. The dryad tells Paul that he is not the only one asking such questions, and asks him to place his ear to the earth. Doing so, Paul begins to hear voices from all over the world, asking “why?” questions similar to his: 

“Why do the idle rich have everything and the workers nothing?” 

With this text as its point of departure, the children participating in Varför were encouraged to build on their ability to ask questions that cut to the center of some of the most profound contradictions of society.

As part of the project “Why…” (2022) at Konsthall C, I asked preschoolers what were some of the most unfair situations they experience in educational spaces at the hands of adults. I then invited the artist Pia König  to make illustrations for 23 of the most common answers. This 23 card set serves as a pedagogical tool for discussing power relations in the classroom with young people.