YOUTH WORKSHOP AT FONDATION CARTIER, PARIS

On Saturday, September 24, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art organized a plankton workshop for young people (8-12 years old). A beautiful day with a dozen aspiring biologists!
Morning: Deborah welcomes Christian at the train station to go collect plankton in different bodies of water in Paris: the Ourq canal, the pond of Buttes Chaumont, the Seine river.
Midday: a laboratory with microscopes is set up in a corner of the museum near the exhibit of Manobu Miyazaki’s photos.
Afternoon: the young people visit the plankton photo exhibit and video installation. Using the microscopes, they discover and take photos of the plankton of Paris: small crustaceans, annelid worms, mollusc larvae.
16h: plankton is collected by the children in the pond of the Foundation’s garden. They even take samples of the water trickling through the sculpture by Giuseppe Penone, “Biforcazione”.
End of the afternoon: the children draw radiolarians from the book “Plankton, Wonders of the Drifting World” and then have snacks in the garden. We chat about the day’s observations and the children’s future plans. We all leave in good spirits.
Thanks to the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art for this initiative.
Thank you to Paris-Sorbonne University for the loan of microscopes.
Thanks to Olivier Ouadah for taking great pictures of the workshop.