Now:
- From 18 April to 29 June 2025: School visits to the exhibition Chrysalides by Ilaria Sagaria (detailed information below)
- From 16 May to 12 October 2025: School visits to the collective exhibition Botanical murmurs (detailed information below)
SUBSCRIBE TO THE SCHOOL NEWSLETTER: via the online form
From 18 April to 29 June 2025:
Exhibition Chrysalides
by Ilaria Sagaria
Maison de l’enfance et de l’adolescence (HUG)
What do we keep from our childhood? What remains of its magic and that existential fragility that seems impossible to hold back?
Since I started working as a teacher, I found myself catapulted into an unexpected world. Day after day I began to look at childhood with different eyes: I saw in these little figures tender and dark creatures at the same time, like chrysalises heading towards something unknown. Since ancient times, human beings have been fascinated by the mystery of metamorphosis, like a message chat has never been deciphered. This work is an attempt to investigate adolescence as a story of being and its change on multiple overlapping levels.
In the world of insects, the chrysalis represents the nymphal stage of butterflies preparing to undergo a metamorphosis; in psychology, however it implies the infinite potential of being in the phases of its transformations: just as the butterfly emerges at the end of a mysterious process of change, similarly human consciousness goes through various phases, enclosing a process and a history.
Within a poetic and psychological dimension of change, intimacy becomes sensorial trespass: our mind, frame after frame, finds itself involved in a pseudoscientific dimension where enchantment and reality overlap. Dreamlike figures seem to abandon themselves to a mechanism of perpetual temporal dilation capable of softening their entry into adult life. Dreamy looks with a hermetic and intimate flavour, interrupted gestures chat give life to those sentimental anxieties inherent in growth.
THEMES AND DISCIPLINES
Questions addressed during the visit include, depending on the age of the pupils:
- Adolescence: How do you represent what you can’t see?
- The metaphor of the chrysalis: what do a chrysalis and a child have in common?
- Science, biology and the archive: how do you combine science and art?
- Portraiture and representation: how has the artist photographed the teenage girls, and how do they collaborate with the photographer?
Depending on the age of the pupils, the subjects and themes covered during the visit include:
- Adolescence, metamorphosis, changes to the body
- Metaphor-Science, biology, archives
- Photography, art, poetry, portraiture
- Dreams, reality
Venue
Fondation Convergences
Maison de l’enfance et de l’adolescence des HUG
Boulevard de la Cluse 26
1205 Genève
Dates
18th April to 29th June 2025
Hours
Visits with the facilitator by reservation only from Monday to Friday between 9:00 and 18:00. Tours without a facilitator are also possible, preferably by prior arrangement, when the Maison de l’enfance et de l’adolescence is open to the public (Monday to Friday, 9h-20h).
Age
all school degrees from 8 years old (5P)
Duration of the visit
30 minutes
Languages
French or English
Price
free for classes
Reservation
via the online form
Further information
by email at visites@centrephotogeneve.ch or by phone at 022 329 28 35
Preparatory visit
Admission is free for teachers wishing to prepare a visit with their class. The preparatory visit is possible during the public opening of the Maison de l’enfance et de l’adolescence, from Monday to Friday, 9h-20h.
FURTHER INFORMATION
From 16 May to 12 October 2025:
Collective exhibition Botanical murmurs
Bibliothèque de Genève (BGE)
While many plants are dismissed as insignificant, harmful or unphotogenic, others invade shops, interiors, social networks and, more generally, our visual culture. Plants can be appreciated for their aesthetic qualities, but they can also become symbols and witnesses to current ecological upheavals. The Monstera deliciosa, for example, is valued in the western culture for its decorative potential, while the Ticino palm has become a symbol of biological invasion and climate change in the space of a few years.
Since its invention, photography has contributed to the development of our knowledge of plants and enriched our visual culture of the plant life. The exhibition features a wide range of contemporary botanical studies by artists from Geneva, Switzerland and abroad, ranging from intimate narratives and scientific documentation to speculative exploration and everyday observation.
This first exhibition in the Centre de la photographie Genève’s new space reflects the Art Nouveau floral friezes in the Espace Ami-Lullin, an exhibition room inaugurated in 1905, as well as its location in the heart of the Parc des Bastions. This park became Geneva’s first botanical garden in 1817, on the initiative of Geneva botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle. He was the author of one of the first botanical classifications, and undertook a major project that led to the description of almost 60,000 plants.
Botanical murmurs presents works by Saskia Groneberg, Yann Gross, Yann Haeberlin, Felicity Hammond, Hilla Kurki, Yann Mingard, Lea Sblandano, Berit Schneidereit, Bernard Tullen, Magdalena Wysocka & Claudio Pogo, and the Conservatoire et Jardin botaniques de Genève.
THEMES AND DISCIPLINES
Questions addressed during the visit include, depending on the age of the pupils:
- Botany and art: what is the story behind Geneva’s first botanical garden? How can we visually describe a plant? How do artists adopt certain botanical codes to create a piece of art?
- Plants and humans: what relationship do we have on an everyday basis with plants, and what do they mean to us? Why are some plants more popular than others? How does plants exist in landscapes that have been urbanised and modified by humans?
- Climate change and plants: why do some plants become invasive and harmful to ecosystems? On the other hand, how can certain plants help combat pollution?
- Narrative and documentary: how can flower photographs be used to tell a personal story? Which strategies do artists use to document very precise and specific subjects?
- Photography in all its forms: can we create sculptures with images, and how? What is photorealism? Is a photographer still a photographer if they use photographs they haven’t taken themselves?
Depending on the age of the pupils, the subjects and themes covered during the visit include:
- Botany, history, ecology
- Archives, personal narratives, documentary
- Photography, art
Venue
Centre de la photographie de Genève
Bibliothèque de Genève
Promenade des Bastions 8
1205 Genève
Dates
16 May to 12 October 2025.
School visits from 19 May 2025.
Hours
Hours: Visits with the facilitator by reservation only from Monday to Friday between 9:00 and 18:00.
Tours without a facilitator are also possible, preferably by prior arrangement, when the museum is open to the public (Tuesday to Friday, 11h-18h, Saturday, 11h-17h).
Age
all school degrees from 8 years old (5P)
Duration of the visit
45 minutes
Languages
French or English
Price
free for classes
Reservation
via the online form
Further information
by email at visites@centrephotogeneve.ch or by phone at 022 329 28 35
Preparatory visit
The preparatory visit is possible during the public opening of the museum.
FURTHER INFORMATION