Totems

As in the film, where format conventions and habits of thought are lightly mocked, this activity offers to play with the material of fears by manipulating their representation through the game of transcription. It is structured into three components, which can be practiced separately, but whose interest lies in the articulation: naming a fear (language / lexicality), telling a fear (language / narration), illustrating a fear (plastic art / volume).

Name a fear. Each child chooses a fear that he has (in reality or fictitiously) experienced and creates a name for it, based on the model of medical nomenclature. The teacher can present the principle of this nomenclature (use of Latin, grammar of concatenation) and study a list of phobias (see the Wikipedia page, or a specialized work) to have fun discovering names/concepts from the most common ("Arachnophobia", "Agoraphobia") to the most surprising ("Arachibutyrophobia: Fear of having peanut butter stuck to the palate", "Athazagoraphobia: Fear of forgetting or of being forgotten”, “Nanopabulophobia: Fear of garden gnomes with wheelbarrows”…). We easily see why it is interesting to imagine exotic fears, to be able to construct a new name – and vice versa: we can very well start from a random Latin aggregate to reconstruct its explanation.

Share a fear. Based on a real memory, or alternatively a fear chosen arbitrarily by the child (for example created in the previous stage, or that of a friend), everyone writes a text recounting the circumstances and manifestations of this fear. All forms of narration are possible: chained first-person narrative, distanced description, tale models (“once upon a time”), telegraphic style list, etc. We will only impose a constraint of volume (between 10 and 40 lines for example) and content: talk about the place, talk about what caused the fear, talk about what happened before, during and after the moment of the fear (but without time or place limits). The teacher can take advantage of this to present different styles of narration (novel, diary, synopsis, poem, etc.).

Illustrate a fear. It involves giving a volume representation of a fear, based on a story or a name. The sculpture/model can be the object of fear, an element of context or circumstance, a setting for the story, something evoked by fear, etc. Here again: no obligatory form, to favor the inventiveness of the transcription. Each child is free to compose a single sculpture or several objects, like in a diorama. However, you must keep the illustration report. So we will ask the children to prepare and explain, to tell their classmates about their production to explain this relationship.

The principle of transcription which underlies the activity lies in the sequence of three components, the result of one being taken as a starting point for another. They can therefore be practiced in any order. We can take this structure as a creativity technique. For

examples of invention of phobia and more generally the principle of creativity exploited, see the drawings of Gary Larson cited on the Wikipedia page devoted to the list of phobias.