The experience of place, to value the perception of a space. When does a space become a place?

The GRAF 2023/Place and Space aims to motivate our pupils to observe their surroundings, becoming aware and engaged with their cultural heritage and society.

Why do we feel affectionate for certain places, some objects or some corners? Some places, like corners, do affect us in different ways. What kind of relations influence our perception of a place? Is it our memory, our feelings, our knowledge?

Place and Space is an invitation to see, to be aware of the vestiges and traces, to be conscious of a place; to perceive the air contained in that space, to be sensitive to those changes in daylight.

We only see what we choose to look at, wrote the British thinker John Berger in his beautiful book Ways of Seeing. Furthermore, this gaze is in continuous movement, not only from one point of view, but looking at “…the relation between things and ourselves”.

In other words, this year’s GRAF concept invites us to reflect upon the experience of a place and how we interact with the places around us.

To touch a place in the sense of being aware of those narratives connected in one’s present.

Valentina Gajardo Moller
The GRAF Director