SILVIA PIO (a cura)
Magie d’Amore 2.0, Giuliano Ladolfi Editore, 2020, is the new storybook by Gabriella Vergari with illustrations by Franco Blandino and a preface by Gabriella Mongardi.
You from Catania and Franco Blandino from Turin and Fossanese by adoption, how did your collaboration start?
Thanks to Margutte, who is not an on-line magazine who was, as they say, a convict of our artistic wedding.
The texts that I gradually published needed to be introduced by an illustration and so I was put in contact with Franco who, for his goodness, greatly appreciated my pen, as I did with his brush too.
A collaboration that over time has proven to be increasingly stimulating and from which a first publication was born, Volteggi. Horizons of images and words, Youcanprint, 2018, which was also presented at the Turin Book Fair and readers have greatly appreciated.
Perhaps because it is a curated proposal, but above all a little different from the usual, given that it constantly and variously dialogues with each other shapes, colors and words, combining them together.
A true synaesthesia between painting and writing, which sees several stories linked to Franco's beautiful illustrations and others arise instead from the suggestions aroused in me by his paintings.
In short, a double flow of sensations and emotions that tries to create a global art project, which this Magie damore 2.0 intended to renew, with 18 new stories and as many images.
Have images and texts been thought together? How much did you inspire each other?
I would say that they are both the result of a shared opportunity, an inspiration that can be born now in me, now in Franco. Who is the first to take it, opens the way and indicates a possible path that the other, if he accepts the challenge, can try to follow, provided he does it in his own way and according to his own perspective.
The premise behind our work (and which in my opinion represents one of the most beautiful and stimulating aspects) is that everyone must feel autonomous and free, so much so that every text and every image remains closed in itself, if taken to only.
But certainly, if tied together, it represents a much more intriguing proposal and open to a plurality of perspectives and solicitations.
Your stories are glimpses of life, lighting, epiphanies ... How much of personal or autobiographical?
Stories are said to happen to those who know how to see them or even just intuit them, in the filigree of reality. In this sense, writing is always the result of an autobiographical journey, as a testimony of oneself and one's gaze on life and the world.
It is also said that, after the Bible and the Odyssey, there would be nothing new to tell, if the perspective with which an author creates his own parallel and possible universe made the difference.
Thus, each narration, if authentic, can truly present itself as a unicum because it is born from a unicum, that is, from the specific creative and expressive will of those who make it, inevitably linked to their experience.
For me, the relationship with the language and the stylistic and lexical choices are also fundamental, which in turn constitute so much a gamble - a utopia, even claims I. Bachmann, Literature as Utopia. Frankfurt lessons - as much as an unmistakable and peculiar figure, precisely if we want personal, of a writer.
The characters seem to be met by chance and investigated with imagination. They have simple and usual names, daily and anti-heroic roles: in-laws and future daughters-in-law, absent fathers and children who will help others, the director of a library, the woman who collects shoes and boyfriends, up to a butterfly that brings memories . Are they people you met?
Many only with the imagination. They knocked on my door and I welcomed them.
Others were born, as I said above, thanks to the images of Franco Blandino.
Still others are the literary transposition of acquaintances, or have gradually been configured as the sum of different characteristics, gathered over time in different individuals, known that they were or even only seen once.
There is your Sicily, but also glimpses that could be found everywhere: cityscapes observed from a window (or it is a window that opens a world inside a house), houses shops street corners, the microcosm of an apartment building or an abandoned village. Here I would be tempted to say that they are familiar to you. It's true?
As for my island, I would say so. It is so rich and varied that it often represents an ideal scenario. An authentic offer of lights, atmospheres, smells and flavors that never ceases to amaze me, so much so that I also tried to decant it and describe it in another text of mine, Capriccio Siciliano, Carthago, 2018. But, as you underline, other places belong to everyone's experience and they are common areas, which aim a little to give the idea of a fundamental universality of the situations narrated in this collection of mine.
They are stories in the present. A present just dilated in the directions of the past and the future. Quite 'everyday' situations, family occasions, social contexts, downtime. Moments in which "you fall inside suddenly and it ends up not detaching them from you anymore ... Or you go into it with the solicitous swagger of the kids in the tunnel of horror" (from the story On the road). What is the time you prefer?
By vocation, tradition, affective and not least professional reasons, that of classical antiquity. I consider above all the Greeks, but of course also the Latins, our Great Fathers. From a mainly western perspective, of course, but not only.
In Magie d'amore 2.0, however, I wanted to try to reflect on this time so complex and convulsive, multi- and multi-cultural, liquid together but also very tied to materiality, which often promises to be new and unpublished, but can also reveal sides already well tested and well experienced by those who preceded us on this earth.
Of course, the so-called social networks and technology that seems to progress unstoppable and many times overwhelm us have now taken over many situations and conditions.
As a good visitor to the Classics, however, I remain convinced that nihil sub sole novum (nothing new under the sun) and that man always remains the same in his depth.
There is, at most, the terrible risk of forgetting the human, and it is above all on this that I wanted to focus the accent, right from the title, Magie d'amore 2.0, which blends together contemporaneity and I would say perennial (more than anteriority), since love remains, and must remain, the feeling of feelings, at all times.
I don't know if you have noticed that the questions are those that the Anglo-Saxon school of journalism suggests to ask when carrying out any narrative body: what, who, where, when. Now the last question remains, why? What were the reasons that led you to write these stories, the inspirations, the messages you want to send? But also what is your working method, where and when do you write?
Do you have a question?
Of course I'm kidding.
To answer the first question, the fateful and crucial one because, I think I could refer to the famous one: nescio sed fieri sentio (I don't know but I feel it coming), with which Catullo tries to explain his feeling for his beloved woman. There are no formulas to illustrate the reasons for an inspiration. It happens.
They will begin to dial in the words. If they convince me and work, I proceed.
This is why I fully agree with your definition of epiphanies.
It's true, I like to fix an existential condition, a moment, or just a gesture among others and make it emblematic. In other words, I don't like overly constructed plots.
I prefer the fragment, the frame of a frame rather than the complete film, the theatrical spot that suddenly turns on a scene and shortly after turns off, abandoning the rest to the inner excavation of those who have caught that moment. It is certainly no coincidence that, among the most intense legacies of ancient literature, we count the extraordinary compositions of the Greek operas.
As for the messages, I think it's time to leave the last word to readers who, in the literary game, constitute a fundamental and vital piece.