Centre de la photographie Genève accompanies and hosts the first edition of the PIPAS Bienniale — Photography and Images for School Learning — designed by, for, and with pupils. Under the theme Photo-story, it invites several study groups from different educational programmes to discover and experiment with the skills involved in organising a biennial event: conceptualisation, editing, curation and event management.
Organised by the Schools and Media Service of the Department of Public Education, Training and Youth (DIP), the Freeze association and the Directorate-General for Compulsory Education, Teaching and Assessment Service (SEE), PIPAS is the first Swiss photography event organised by young people from compulsory education (EP, SEC I) through to post-compulsory education. The students have been entrusted with the conceptualisation of the images, their production, the exhibition layout and communication with the public. PIPAS thus aims to place the image at the heart of school learning. In a world where media are becoming increasingly digital, PIPAS offers young people the opportunity to gain a hands-on understanding of the processes involved in creating and disseminating photographs, enabling them to grasp their complexity and impact. Thinking, anticipating, questioning, contextualising, experimenting, creating, sharing: through this hands-on learning, the event fosters the acquisition of knowledge and skills in an independent, practical and reflective manner.
With the theme Photo-story, chosen for this first biennial, pupils and their teachers were invited to make the relationships between text and images visible and legible, in the service of new narratives, new aesthetics and new spheres of attention (educational, artistic, social and environmental). Their works span a wide range of media, from performance to sculpture, including photo-novels, dazibao, jewellery design and fictionalised portraits.
