“Contrastes” (Contrasts) is one of the games that make up the “Jogos Visuais” collection, published in 1974 by Edições ASA in Porto. It was designed by the painter Elvira Leite and the architect Manuela Malpique, both teachers in the Portuguese public education system in disciplines related to the arts. In addition to adding playfulness to the learning process, the game aimed to promote the development of tactile and visual perception, to stimulate the expansion of vocabulary and, in a school context, it enabled Elvira Leite to transform the concepts of contrast, difference and similarity into strategies for generating discussions on issues and problems related to society.
The first version of the game had two copies and was made by hand by Elvira Leite and Manuela Malpique, on cardboard, with handwriting, using authentic materials that gave the contrasts three-dimensional and tactile characteristics, but the authors also resorted to representing the contrasts by drawing on paper. These two unique copies were designed to be used in a school context – in the classroom or during breaks – and no longer exist. In the published game, some cards were printed, while others retained the materiality of the first version, with elements such as iron, polystyrene, sandpaper, wood, and foam. The production of these cards required that each one had to be made by hand, which increased production costs and, ultimately, the retail price of 500 escudos. According to Elvira Leite, no copies were sold. Hitherto ignored in both national and international contexts, “Contrastes” are inescapable materialities of 20th-century Portuguese art-educational production.
When the game “Contrastes” was finished and about to be published by ASA, Elvira Leite and Manuela Malpique sent a copy to Bruno Munari, an Italian designer, artist and educator whom Elvira Leite had met in person at the 1972 World Congress of the International Society for Education Through Art in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. Bruno Munari responded with several comments, expressing his enthusiasm for the game and saying that he would try to reprint it in Italy, which did not happen. Such observations did not influence the edition of the game published by ASA, in 1974, since there was no time to reorganize it from structural changes before its launch, having been integrated into the reissue of the game by Architoys in 2019, now a partnership between Elvira Leite and the architect Marco Ginoulhiac.
The use of contrasts to improve expression, visual communication and creativity spread throughout the 20th century as a strategy for shaping the child and the creative subject. Perhaps Johannes Itten’s Theory of Contrasts, used in Voukours, the preliminary course at the Bauhaus, is at the base of this diffusion since we can find its characteristics assimilated in the generality of the training in visual education. Closer to Elvira Leite, we have the thought of Bruno Munari who tells us, in a sentence quoted in the leaflet that accompanies “Contrastes” itself: “An ancient rule of visual communication is that of simultaneous contrasts, whereby the proximity of two forms of opposite nature enhances and intensifies their communication”. In his book “Fantasia” (1977), the use of contrasts and opposites becomes a means of promoting fantasy, the ability to imagine and consequently to create. Moreover, we find there the argument that the search for the opposite is a “natural” and “spontaneous” need to correct imbalances in life, in a perspective that combines design and arts education with a notion of the “good life” [see the text “Games in hands, questions in mind: in the flesh of the impossibility of About what's there” in the CREAT_ED project book].
The notion of contrasts could be conveyed through a reductive binarisation of the world and the way it is perceived. By listing a series of opposites named and represented, the variations between the two opposing poles end up being underrepresented, implying the absence and perceptual exclusion of existing diversity. On the other hand, what lies outside the extremes gives room for the affirmation of a supposedly neutral characteristic. It is the educator’s choice to use and scale the enormous possibilities of shading from one contrast to the other, working with the recognition of the colonial and empirical matrix of all educational materials and apparatuses of the European fabric, of which “Contrastes” are no exception.
The game “Contrastes” with its “visual and tactile images”, as presented in the game’s leaflet, operates within an [[education of the senses]. The authentic materials that make up the game, aimed at tactile exploration, reaffirm the place of sensory experimentation in education as belonging to childhood and to the theory of a [[child development]] itself full of binarities, colonialities and exclusions in the oppositions it produces, such as concrete-abstract, body-mind, sense-thought, simple-complex, child-adult, 'primitive'-civilised.
How can we work with the notion of contrast in arts education without activating binary simplifications and exclusions?
What meaning do we give to the education of the senses in our practices? Do we reproduce coloniality towards the people with whom we work?
AM, CA and SG