BERGAMO.- As part of Pedagogia della Speranza (Pedagogy of Hope), the program dedicated to education as a practice of freedom and transformation, in summer 2026 the GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo presents Tabula Plena, an exhibition by Fosbury Architecture and Claire Fontaine conceived as a permanent laboratory that transforms the Sala delle Capriate at Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo into a space for encounter and shared knowledge production, with contributions by Adelita Husni Bey, URPS (Ufficio Resurrezione Parole Smarrite), and Numero Cromatico.

The laboratory platform

The laboratory platform designed by Fosbury Architecture—a collective that expands the boundaries of architecture through a multidisciplinary approach—was conceived in relation to the thought of the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire. In Freire’s vision, education is a process of emancipation through which individuals do not passively receive knowledge—hence the platform’s title, in opposition to the concept of tabula rasa—but rather construct it critically, developing an awareness of their own role in the world and of the possibility of transforming it.

The project stems from the conviction that the contemporary museum is not merely a place of conservation and display, but a space of learning, dialogue, and transformation, capable of welcoming diverse audiences and activating processes of shared knowledge. In a historical context marked by rapid social, technological, and cultural change, the laboratory is presented as an open space in which to experiment with new forms of relationship, experience, cultural citizenship and knowledge.

In this perspective, Fosbury Architecture’s installation functions as an inhabitable, welcoming, and accessible platform that hosts three free, permanent workshops, designed to foster the active participation of the community, people of all ages, families and schools. The installation also features an arena dedicated to gathering, listening and the reading of texts that explore the constellation of themes surrounding Pedagogia della Speranza.

The design of the platform is the result of a collaborative process that also involved children, adolescents, and young people from 13 school classes from throughout the city and province of Bergamo over the months preceding the opening. Through a cycle of workshops devised by Fosbury Architecture and led by GAMeC educators, students explored meanings, interpretations and expressive possibilities linked to the themes proposed, translating them into glyphs. These visual configurations, integrated into the space of Palazzo della Ragione and arranged on the black surface of the platform—recalling the blackboard, an iconic element of school life—will offer visitors the opportunity to experience new ways of exploring, relating to others, to the historic architectural heritage and to the exhibition context.

Claire Fontaine’s intervention

In close dialogue with Tabula Plena and the workshop activities, the site-specific intervention by the artistic duo Claire Fontaine (Paris, 2004) deepens the reflection on themes of knowledge, education, and the influence that electronic devices and artificial intelligences exert on social relations and on our perception of the world.

The installation consists of five suspended luminous sculptures in the form of emoji. The three sculptures of the globe reproduce three emoji drawn from the digital vocabulary to represent three visions of an interconnected and globalized world. Suspended above the heads of participants, they remind us that the world must always be viewed from multiple perspectives, and that the perspective offered by our screens is not sufficient — for it is we who “create worlds” by weaving meaningful relationships. The smartphone, here stripped of its interactive dimension, serves as an image of social isolation, as well as of access to the world constantly mediated by the screen. Lastly, the wrapped gift introduces a reflection on desire and the logic of consumption.

Emoji are prefabricated drawings conceived to express our emotions swiftly and synthetically in digital communication. They are extremely familiar images, part of the everyday lexicon of digital exchange, which Claire Fontaine temporarily removes from the interactive flow, transforming them into physical, three-dimensional and static objects: contemporary portraits of our social relations. The intervention thus operates as a device for unlearning, inviting us to unlearn entrenched habits and acquired automatisms in order to open new spaces of critical awareness.

The permanent workshops

The three permanent workshops, active and freely accessible throughout the duration of Tabula Plena, have been co-designed with artists and experts in educational and research practices. While adopting different approaches, they share a common objective: to challenge certainties, habits, and established modes of learning, to value listening and process, and to restore to participants an active role in the construction of knowledge.

The activity designed with the Numero Cromatico collective is titled 36 Cards for Endless Forms, and offers a tool for developing a critical gaze on some of the instruments through which we interpret the world. By combining a set of tiles arranged on magnetic boards, participants construct their own algorithmic configurations, becoming active agents in the process of knowledge production. The multiplicity of possible configurations reveals that algorithms are not predetermined, but rather human constructions shaped by strategic choices.

Busillis, the workshop developed with URPS (Ufficio Resurrezione Parole Smarrite) by Sabrina D’Alessandro, works with subjective interpretation and imagination as forms of knowledge on a par with traditional and institutional ones, drawing on an archive of unusual objects and rare words. The personal narratives elaborated by the public will be gathered into an open, ever-evolving collective sound archive, available for listening in the arena space.

Parliamo di Educazione (Let’s Talk About Education), the activity developed together with Adelita Husni Bey, invites participants to interrogate a set of definitions of words belonging to the world of school and education, recognizing and questioning their contradictions. The questions guiding the reflection around the chosen words encourage potentially transformative forms of critical thinking.