From an encounter
to a school.

PHILIA SCHOOL grew out of a series of experiments that began in France in 2022.

That year, Ygaël Attali conceived Philia & Kids, a non-profit initiative developed by Galerie Philia around a simple question: what happens when children are invited to take a genuine part in the creative process, rather than simply observe it?

The first edition took place in Breil-sur-Roya, a village in the French Alps. Children aged six and seven were invited to imagine sculptural furniture through drawing. Their ideas were then developed alongside designers Antoine Behaghel and Alexis Foiny and transformed into objects in local olive wood by craftspeople from the region.

The intention was never to teach children how to become designers. The project was instead conceived as an encounter between different forms of knowledge: the imagination of the child, the experience of the designer, the intelligence of the hand and the resistance of a material rooted in a place.

For the children, the process meant discovering that an idea does not move directly from imagination to object. It passes through conversations, decisions, adjustments, limitations and discoveries. It also meant seeing their own ideas taken seriously enough to enter the world and become real.

A second edition followed in Palaiseau, on the outskirts of Paris. Children worked alongside designer Frédéric Saulou and craftspeople using stones excavated during the construction of the Grand Paris Express.

Once again, the material was not neutral. It already belonged to a territory and carried a history before entering the workshop.

Through these first projects, an approach gradually emerged. Design was valuable not as a discipline to be taught from above, but as a situation in which observation, imagination, technical knowledge, collaboration and the limits of matter could meet.

The two projects also established a first public history for the initiative, receiving significant international attention and creating a precedent from which a longer-term educational project could later develop.

In June 2025, in Petrópolis, Brazilian designer Gisela Simas met curator and Galerie Philia co-founder Ygaël Attali.

Their encounter brought together two trajectories.

Ygaël arrived with the experience of Philia & Kids and with the conviction, developed through the first projects in France, that children could become genuine participants in a creative process involving designers, craftspeople and locally rooted materials.

Gisela brought an intimate knowledge of Petrópolis, long-standing relationships with local craftspeople and communities, and the network developed through SOS Serra.

Together, they saw the possibility of taking the experiment further.

Petrópolis offered particularly fertile ground. Its relationship with nature, woodworking and craft made it possible to develop the project in close connection with a specific territory and with the people whose knowledge already belonged to it.

The encounter did not simply reproduce Philia & Kids in another country. It transformed the scale and horizon of the project.

What had begun as a series of individual experiences could now become something continuous.

Following this encounter, Gisela Simas and Ygaël Attali created the first Brazilian edition of Philia & Kids together, in partnership with SOS Serra, local educators and master craftspeople from the region.

Twelve children from public schools in Petrópolis, in the fourth to sixth grades, began by observing the landscape around them. They explored forms and structures in nature and translated what they saw into drawings of sculptural furniture.

Those drawings were then entrusted to seven master craftspeople: Paulo Pissurno, Thomaz Brasil, Vinícius Cesar, Cláudio Vasconcelos, Guga Casari, Tomé Peregrino and José Luiz Mayworm.

Led by Guga Casari, the craftspeople worked alongside Gisela and the children to bring each idea into being while making every piece structurally possible.

The material was wood reclaimed from fallen urban trees and collected at COMDEP’s green-waste centre.

Each child remained the author of their piece. Gisela Simas, Guga Casari and the craftspeople accompanied its development and technical realisation, helping the original intuition encounter the possibilities and constraints of matter.

This relationship was central to the project.

The children’s drawings were taken seriously by people with a lifetime of knowledge in their hands.

The craftspeople showed them how wood resists, where it yields, what it allows and how an idea sometimes has to change in order to become real. The children, in turn, brought forms and intuitions unconstrained by professional habits.

Knowledge moved in more than one direction.

The reclaimed wood introduced another dimension. Because it already belonged to the city and bore the traces of a previous life, questions of reuse, resources and responsibility entered the process naturally, through making rather than through abstract instruction.

The resulting works were presented in Brazil before being auctioned in São Paulo alongside works donated by Brazilian designers and artists. The proceeds contributed to the craftspeople, the children’s communities and the development of what was beginning to be imagined as a permanent educational project.

But the most important result could not be measured by the objects alone.

What remained was the attention of the children, their engagement with materials, their relationships with the people who accompanied them and the experience of seeing their ideas treated with seriousness.

The question then became how to continue.

From that question came PHILIA LAB.

Launched in Petrópolis in 2026, Philia Lab is the experimental chapter through which the future PHILIA SCHOOL is being developed.

It is at once a programme for children and a space for research.

Rather than establishing a fixed pedagogical method in advance, the Lab allows that methodology to emerge through experience. It observes what happens, documents it, listens to participants and adjusts accordingly.

The first pilot programme runs from August to December 2026 under the supervision of the team led by Mariana Accardo.

Over seventeen Saturdays, eleven children and teenagers aged eleven to thirteen take part in twelve creative laboratories and four cultural and territorial immersions, alongside moments of exhibition and public exchange.

The programme moves continuously between the workshop and the territory.

The children observe, draw, experiment and use tools. They develop individual ideas while learning to work collectively. They encounter materials not simply as substances to manipulate, but as things with their own properties, histories and limits.

They also work alongside people carrying very different forms of knowledge.

Craft, design, architecture, nature, culture and the surrounding city become part of the same educational landscape.

The territory itself becomes part of the curriculum.

PHILIA SCHOOL grows from this history.

It begins with the intuition developed through Philia & Kids in France and is transformed through the encounter in Petrópolis between an existing approach, a new territory and a network of people capable of giving it continuity.

It is conceived as a permanent educational project, but not as the reproduction of a fixed programme.

Its identity and methodology are developing through the experiences taking place within it.

Children, educators, craftspeople, families, materials and territories are therefore not simply recipients of the project or the setting in which it happens.

They participate in shaping the institution itself.

The purpose of PHILIA SCHOOL is not to train future designers or craftspeople from an early age.

Design and craft are means rather than ends.

They create situations in which children can develop observation, curiosity, imagination, inventiveness, patience, experimentation, responsibility and collaboration.

A material can become a teacher because it resists.

A craftsperson can become a teacher because knowledge is carried through practice.

A child can become a contributor because imagination is itself a form of attention.

And a territory can become a curriculum because learning does not happen separately from the world in which we live.

What began in France in 2022 as an experiment in taking children’s creative ideas seriously found, through the encounter between Ygaël Attali and Gisela Simas in Petrópolis, the conditions to become something more lasting.

PHILIA SCHOOL remains deliberately unfinished.

Its ambition is to grow without becoming rigid, to develop a methodology without turning it into a formula, and eventually to allow this relational structure to take root in other territories while remaining transformed by each of them.

Because learning is not only a way of understanding the world.

It is a way of entering into relationship with it.