inchiostro carta pianura

The Pianura Padana, an existential and metaphysical place, is the one that we have always had in our eyes and that we cannot see with adequate awareness.
The book brings together a silent dialogue between verses and drawings of solitary and uninhabited plains, made with black ink only. Influencing each other, the gesture of drawing and writing exchange evocations and memories.
The drawings by Alessandro Adelio Rossi capture the views along the A4 motorway towards the east, the sea, “Towards the mouth” (to quote Gianni Celati, a sort of tutelary deity of the two authors “narrators of the plains”), towards the Polesine and towards the south, looking out the right-hand window of the car, throughout all the summers of childhood.
Instead, the words by Chiara Zonato dictate an inner rhythm that smells of earth, humidity, animals, plants and seasons. They vibrate in the emptiness of the white spaces, of the “new paragraph” dense as lacks and vivid memories, observing “the curvature of time”, “still and regular”. In that plain that “forces to surrender / like few other things: / darkness, night, love, death”.
The book is printed on paper produced using excess algae from the Venetian lagoon.