Children’s workshop with Chloé Quenum around the exhibition “The Dream Argument”

The workshop invites children to enter the exhibition The Dream Argument through the experience of shared dreaming. Sitting in a circle, we begin with the sentence: “Last night, we all had the same dream...” From there, each person adds a sentence, an image, a detail. Little by little, a landscape emerges: perhaps a talking forest, a staircase reaching up to the sky, a tiny animal that has grown giant, a door hidden under water. The dream is constructed collectively, like a story invented by many voices. We can evoke the universe of Claude Ponti and his abundant worlds where objects transform and creatures seem to have come out of a dream, notably in Blaise et le château d'Anne Hiversère (Blaise and the Castle of Anne Hiversère) or L'Arbre sans fin (The Endless Tree), where dreams open secret passages and make characters grow. As in traditional tales, the marvelous arises without explanation: we pass through a mirror, follow a light in the night, meet a strange guide.

Once the story has been told and read aloud, the children are invited to spread it out on a very large piece of paper placed on the floor or wall. Each child chooses an element from the collective dream and begins to draw it, allowing the shapes to merge, overlap, and transform. The drawing becomes a shared fresco where boundaries disappear, as in a dream where everything flows. The work of Marc Chagall, where figures float in space, or that of Leonor Fini, populated by mysterious creatures, can be evoked to show that artists also explore these inner territories. The children can add words, fragments of sentences, unexpected colors; nothing is impossible in this shared space.

The workshop ends with a time for observation and discussion around the mural. Each child recounts their part of the dream and discovers how it interacts with those of the others. The final work becomes the trace of a collective imagination, a landscape invented together, which echoes the exhibition by showing that dreams are not only an intimate experience, but also a shared space where the world can be recounted, transformed, and reinvented.