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Camilia lies on the floor as she draws. Pencils surround her, as do other children. Her eyes shift from the sheet of paper in front of her, to a mirror, to a painting of a woman with thick, dark eyebrows.

She is learning to paint her first self-portrait, inspired by one that tormented Mexican artist Frida Kahlo made of herself in 1942.

Close by are the large, rounded figures - “fatsos” to her — by Colombian painter Fernando Botero.

Camila finds these amusing, much to the irritation of other visitors to the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (Malba).

Many of them are upset that museum guards allow these children to sprawl on the floor, laughing, talking loudly and heaven forbid, even drawing.

“Children want very different things. They don’t see the museum as a boring place when the activity fulfils their expectations and allows them to be in control,” said Florencia Gonzalez, in charge of Malba’s education and cultural activities department.

As a result, “Please Do Touch” is a slogan at the Participative Science Museum (MPC) which is not far from the Malba, and where education manual theories become palpable, visible experiences, drawing admiration from old and young alike.

“Learning science does not have to be boring,” is another rule at the MPC. Museums have gone from being places for objects to places for people.

The challenge facing museum experts these days is to understand the children’s viewpoint and attract them and make them become interested in what is on display.

“You cannot ask them to spend 30 minutes looking at a painting. Their attention is spread out.

"They do four things at the same time. That does not mean that they lack attention, rather, it is a different kind of attention. They grew up with Internet and chat rooms,” Gonzalez said.

To see how electricity can emerge from one’s own hand, how a rainbow is created or to experiment mechanical laws on one’s own body ­— the resources available to get children involved are practically infinite.

Sometimes, all you need is a piece of paper and questions coming freely from the imagination of an 8-year-old.

The children use music, boxes with different kinds of textures, copies of the artworks they can touch, games and jigsaw puzzles, that allow them to actively approach art from a non-serious viewpoint.

The youngest kids try to fit inside an empty frame like a figure in the “Abaporu” painting by Brazilian artist Tarsila de Amaral.

The older ones connect to “Demonstration,” by Argentine Antonio Berni. “I want tastier food at school,” a girl writes on a placard, surprising her teacher.

At the art workshop the girl produces a tray with brightly-colored, mouth-watering foods and the teacher is forced to acknowledge that school lunches are often quite tasteless.

“Adolescents are more critical and pose questions so we have to create areas for those discussions to take place,” Gonzalez said.

She pointed out the Berni painting on show always unleashes passions. When parents come along as well the experience is even more illuminating.

“There are discussions between generations and knowledge is created by everyone in a joint effort.

"The visit turns into a social environment and allows civic lessons to be learnt, from learning how to listen to the other one, to make your point, or simply to shut up and look,” Gonzalez said.

“The challenge is for a museum visit to be something special so that later on it will turn into something regular. This needs to be practised and it is the museum’s responsibility to achieve that.” 


DPA