>>> Creative Development Seminars
Lecture
Creativity can be applied to every human activity: making money, building bombs, waging war, but also improving people’s lives. The Anglo-American approaches to creativity developed in recent years seem to leave aside the question of its quality, focusing mainly on its mechanical construction and development. In our seminar, by contrast, creativity has a purpose. We call it growing creativity. Growing creativity serves the liberation of human beings from violence: it is the creativity of nonviolence. It is not creativity for its own sake, but creativity directed toward resolving difficulties and overcoming explicit limits on artistic, individual and social growth.
Seminar
Participants are invited to arrive with an aesthetic problem they would like to solve: perhaps a painting or drawing whose development has come to a standstill. Creativity is a way of resolving difficulties, overcoming blocks and discovering paths not previously explored. We study the different stages of the creative process identified by our researchers and then return to the problematic artwork to determine which stage was missing or insufficiently developed. This is a seminar about method. Participants learn an approach to creative development that can subsequently be applied to any problem, not only an artistic one.
Seminar topics
Who can attend
For anyone wishing to learn a method for looking at things from different points of view. Maximum participation: 15 people.
Duration
The seminar lasts 16 hours across Saturday and Sunday, plus a two-hour lecture on Friday evening.
Fee
The fee for each seminar is agreed upon with those interested.
Download workshop information sheet (PDF, Italian)
Lecture preview
La creatività crescente
It is said that creativity does not consist in finding new solutions but in asking new questions. Its enemy is mechanical repetition. Both creative and mechanical movements are driven by energy, by an intention seeking fulfilment. In mechanical behaviour, we might imagine the underlying intention as an impulse that cannot find another route and repeatedly follows the same path. The first creative act is therefore to identify this initial impulse, which we call a need. We often act without clearly understanding where our actions originate. The first step in creativity is thus deconstruction: chaos and creative disorder.
We deconstruct in order to reconstruct, again and again, until we intuit a direction to follow. It is a game of questions, like the endless “whys” we asked as children.
This understanding of creativity applies to the mind, which has been the focus of almost all researchers, but creativity also belongs to the body and the emotions. Bodily creativity begins with irrepressible desire, with Dionysus. Painting is creativity of form and colour, not primarily of the intellect, as science and philosophy are. We will learn once more to feel creative energies stimulated by things, colours and forms rather than by intellectual assumptions.
The aim of the seminar is not merely to explore the creative process, but to understand its different possibilities for development, the appropriate use of artistic techniques, and the tools of research, conception, elaboration, refinement and, above all, discernment in the face of the countless technical and expressive possibilities of artistic practice.
When we are disoriented, we follow the current. A thousand stimuli confuse us: we would like to take every path, and feel that choosing one means losing all the others. We move in an attempt to compensate for emptiness. In reality, we are not seeking something but fleeing something. The pursuit of growing creativity is a deeply inspired method of orientation, through which, when the answer appears, we can say: this, and no other, is the solution I was looking for.