BOOKED OUT Workshop for school classes: In the footsteps of our ancestors
09.01.2025, 11:30
The workshop is booked out.
About the footprints of Laetoli
For secondary school students (grades 7-10)
with Kristina Kulikova and Betül Dalkic
Duration: 1 hour
3.6 million years ago, the early ancestors of humans, Australopithecus afarensis, travelled through a landscape in northern Tanzania. Because fresh volcanic ash covered the ground and hardened into tuff with the onset of rain, the footprints have not been blown away but have survived as imprints to the present day. The footprints are the first palaeontological signs (science of the animal and plant world in the rocks of past geological eras) of individuals who were able to walk upright. A 3.6 metre long footprint can be seen, in which a child’s footprint and two adult footprints can be recognised. The so-called imprints of Laetoli open a unique window into the past. They enable researchers to investigate an important chapter in human evolution. At the same time, they open up spaces for the imagination. What did the world look like back then? How did people live in the past? What did they look like? What did they do?
The aim of the workshop is to give children and young people a haptic experience of traces that can endure over time by making imprints. By comparing their own imprints with the imprints of Laetoli, the aim is to create an awareness of the history of mankind and the significance of such traces for scientific findings about our past.
The workshop includes creative work with various materials that produce imprints. The participants’ own bodies, especially feet and hands, are used and moulded. The various traces are then read, interpreted and put into context with the exhibit.
Please note that the workshop will take place in German.
About the workshop series for school classes in the exhibition The Presence of Absence in cooperation with the Institute for Art Education at Justus Liebig University Giessen
The workshops for children and young people are organised in cooperation with the Institute for Art Education at Justus Liebig University Giessen. Under the direction of Tobias Becker, the students of his project seminar offer a rich programme specially developed for the Frankfurter Kunstverein.
The starting point will be individual works of art or exhibition objects from the fields of art, natural history and archaeology. The workshop leaders will familiarise your class with various materials and techniques that illustrate the themes of the exhibition. Through the practical use of materials such as clay, plaster, soot, but also stargazing apps, children and young people are introduced to numerous topics through vivid sensory impressions, through feeling and touching.
The workshops are about learning to read traces and to perceive them as the starting point for imagination and stories, but also for logical reasoning. In the workshops, the students will also creatively design signs and traces themselves in order to experience and reflect on the world that surrounds us.
Our motto is to know the past in order to imagine the future and thus positively change the present.
Further information here.