It’s a matter of education. It’s all about training. that’s what Rodolfo Masto from the Institute of the Blind in Milan told me during an interview. disability can be overcome with the right training. education. and access to culture. a blind person who can study and participate in culture can integrate in society as anyone else. the word difficult does not imply the same limitations as the word impossible. and this applies to everyone. sighted or not. what makes the difference is education. the chance to study. to read. it opens us the doors of understanding and therefore of tolerance. education open us the doors of the world in all its different realities.
welfare should mean culture. travels. books. theatre. cinema. museums. but books above all. reading and focusing on the words of someone else who is different and far from us. but strangely. now that almost everyone. at least in our part of the world. can go to school. and travel. welfare means mainly technology. and pursuing comfort. a peaceful life with no problems. we’ve landed at horizon zero. our horizon corresponds to the tip of our nose. and beyond it we must not. we don’t want. we cannot see anymore. we have eyes only for digital displays. and that is not the world... it’s the representation of the world. controlled. photoshopped. bought. to give us our daily bread.
as Charles Foster writes in Being a Beast: “When my ancestor on the East African savanna hoisted herself for the first time onto her hind legs, it was a journey of far more than a few feet. It was a journey into a new world. She was immediately a creature whose world was framed not by the top of the grass and the baked mud of the ground, but by the far horizon and the stars”. so... if we have lost our ability to see the sky and the stars above our heads. and we are somehow back to the top of the grass and the baked mud of the ground. what will become of us?
the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding comes to my mind. especially the bride’s father. fixing everything with windex. have you seen it? so I. living in a little world just like the protagonist. do the same thing. but instead of windex I say books. I give the same solution to the problems of the two unfortunate minors under my custody: reading. reading a book. any book. better to start with a novel.
one of them told me once annoyed: I can’t say cluck-cluck without you running to buy me a book on chicken breading! yes. it’s true. but I don’t care. I believe in this. tenacity. perseverance. the difference between a person who reads and one who doesn’t stands out. in the way one structures a discourse. made of words that become sentences, transforming into periods and finally into complete stories. in the way one lives and understands what we have. and what we don’t. in the way we address others. and also in the way written words become images! yes. you can say from an illustration whether who made it is a reader or not.
when you read all that surrounds you changes inevitably. no matter what you read.
it’s a matter of education. and reading is education. reading is important. to develop cognitive and historical memory. concentration. vision...
and that’s why. in our small world of paper. dominated by images. not by texts for sure.
I’m proposing for all 2018. for all the seven issues of #ILLUSTRATI. a book.
because it’s a matter of education.
do you want to be better illustrators? read more.
this issue is dedicated to Graciela Beatriz Cabal. and to her great work as a tireless writer and reading ambassador in the lands she has been allowed to reach.