The Visual Games are a collection of materials made up of books, games, book-games, worksheets, modules and equipment, aimed at the visual education of children and young people. They were conceived by the painter Elvira Leite and the architect Manuela Malpique, both arts teachers in Portuguese public education. It was at the invitation of the Edições ASA – a Porto’s publisher dedicated to the pedagogical and literary area, known in the country for its school manuals – that Elvira Leite and Manuela Malpique began to think about this editorial line, based on the difficulties they encountered in the school routine. The publication of the Visual Games took place in 1974, a year marked by the beginning of the democratic period in Portugal after 48 years of dictatorship.

According to Elvira Leite (1936), the Visual Games were a commercial failure. They were on sale in bookstores, not in toy stores and, probably, in the same places where other materials from Edições ASA could be found, therefore, we can consider that only a specific fringe of Portuguese society would have consumption habits of materials designed specifically for children. Despite this “financial failure”, the Visual Games are known and are still used by those who have them, thanks to the free distribution made by Elvira Leite after the publisher deposited hundreds (or thousands) of copies in her garage, having used them in her classes at the school where she taught and in workshops at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, offered to schools, friends, art educators. This causality made the Visual Games reach social groups that would possibly not have had access, spreading and gaining notoriety in a restricted circuit of interested parties.

Visual Games are absent from a historical narrative of art education in Portugal made up to the present, even in the face of the inexpressive national production of these types of materials. Perhaps part of this absence is due to its singular emergence at the hands of women teachers – and not designers or recognized pedagogues at the time, something they would become over time – in an impoverished country in Southern Europe, in the city of Porto which, despite being the second largest in the country, it did not have the same attention as the geographical and cultural capital, Lisbon. However, this situation is not reflected in the survival of these same Games among those who know them through the charismatic figure of Elvira Leite.

We are interested in looking again at these materials, as they hold within themselves a power of action and reactivation, but at the same time preserve certain visual grammars and statements to be rethought and problematized considering our present. Bringing them to this [[archive]] implies preserving them, reactivating them and inserting them into a [[history of the present]] that perceives the appearance of Visual Games through the various forces in the field of arts education that crossed their authors at the time of their conception and still permeate our daily practices.

It will be in the Visual Games catalog that we will find the thoughts of the authors and the framework of what they propose:

“Visual Games propose a time for reflection on the visual messages that, at all times, impress us. Based on everyday learning, they offer stimuli that, through the selection and association of images, lead to the discovery of the elements that constitute and make the visual message visible: texture, shape, structure, module, movement. Playing, discovering, seeing, associating, creating are means that Visual Games propose for the search or construction of visual information. Visual Games, insofar as they bring memory and observation into play, develop thinking and help verbalize it, awaken and enrich sensitivity, leading, in the long term, to the conscious choice of certain values to integrate into life”.

There is the inscription of the Visual Games in an aesthetic education plan as [[education of the senses]] that aims at the improvement of expression. This goes back to the idea of education through art found in Herbert Read (1943), which would place artistic expressiveness at the center of human development, but which carried with it a series of [[colonialities]] related to the creative child [[see Education through Art]].

Visual Games are aimed at a visual education based on an allegedly neutral grammar and visual language, using universalizing notions of modern design about ways of seeing and producing visually. The very visuality present in Visual Games is a product and expression of this modern design by employing 'pure' shapes, solid colors, sans-serif fonts, prevalence of white space, minimalism of textual information and emphasis on the visual form. According to Anoushka Khandwala in the text “On the Encroachment of Modernism: Class, Culture and Colonialism” (2022) minimalism and the 'clean' aspect of modern design can be understood as a symbolic of wealth and an indicator fetishized of social class, disregarding and excluding the existence of other visual traditions.

Being more aware of the historical forces that intersect these materials, how can they be critically reactivated?

Why is there a particular focus on certain visual grammars still in current practice?

CA, AM, SG, RB

timeline