Melbourne, New York (a few times), Bollate for the first time in a jail, Toronto, everywhere a life-size artwork (Tattoo Tim) goes, Hobart, London (many times), Venice (many times), Reggio Emilia (many times), Ankara and Istanbul, Basel, Munich, Orizaj, Rome, Edinburgh, Milan, Barcelona, Asuncion, Perth, Taipei, Oxford, Nantes, Paris, Stuttgart, Turin, Philadelphia, Bitonto, Naples (a few times).…and many more. By having read us, you met people and places from more than 65 cities in 2017 – a journey run just beside their hearts.
Do you want to know something more in a glance about them if you’re new here?
Before playing our One Year of Dreams. movie, please read back some of their answers to our interviews. And when you find poets or writers among them, do not forget to browse our sections of literature (short stories, poems) where you can read the works they borrowed to us!
‘I was born in Melbourne in the 1970s. I was accepted into a top art school when I was 20. I moved to Amsterdam when I was 28 and I had to begin my career again as the Dutch were tough on me but I grew a lot creatively. At 35 I had a little epiphany about my work and my journey after years of searching to find my voice – I had a moment of clarity and it has been with me ever since. I moved to New York when I was 38.’
Paul Barbera, photographer, New York and Melbourne
‘I’ve been a kinder garden pedagogue for 22 years. After this job, for a personal interest, I opened a small catering company dealing to treat the wealthy Milanese bourgeois families. And when I ended this business because I was on the point to retire, the director of Bollate Detention Centre asked me if I wanted to start a catering inside a jail, this jail. Here, in Bollate.
So, before that, I guess you’ve not had any correctional experience
Nothing, zero experiences. I had, of course, a lot of charity experiences but never in a detention centre. It was a field in which I had never employed myself or even thought about it!’
Silvia Polleri, In Galera Restaurant, Bollate
‘Toronto is very multicultural and open to the world; it’s really affected my attitude to life. Really, you find people from everywhere here, and somehow everyone manages to keep their own cultural identity while at the same time being Canadian. Torontonians, and I’d say Canadians in general, are not just tolerant but actually welcoming of diversity—we kind of thrive on it. Because of this, it’s also much easier to be gay and out in Toronto than it is in Italy. It’s just not a big deal here because everyone has openly gay family and friends. Sometimes I forget what a privilege this is.
What do I give back to Toronto? I think an experience, attitude, sensibility, and way of being that is a hybrid between Europe and North America.’
Sascha, Toronto
‘Can you tell us about your life after that decision to become a lifesize artwork?
Wim Delvoye and this project opened the door to an unknown world for me. I always loved art, but wasn’t creative myself. From one day to the next I suddenly had access to these amazingly creative people and their art planet. Out of nowhere I became a part of it all. But until this day I’ve always felt like an observer. From the outside looking in. But after ten years I am ‘TIM’ now. By Wim Delvoye. I have my role in this bizarre circus. The experiment is working. I also like that as long as I live, what the piece is and what I do will not change. The tattoo will get older and I will just sit there until I’m gone.’
‘You hear a lot about how libraries must change, and librarians must change too. To be honest, I find this odd and amusing at the same time – libraries and librarians have always had to change. They are very good at it because they have the skills to evaluate information and turn it into useful knowledge – and often into wisdom. It’s very narrow to think of libraries as only being about books – they are not and never have been. The very first libraries were small chambers filled with clay tablets, later ones had scrolls, then codices and books and now also computers and electronic tablets (something of a full circle). Our profession is all about storing information (in any format) and making it useful – plurality is our normal. The Mona Library is special because at its heart it is very traditional: a wonderful collection of books. However, we also use the latest technology to carry out research and to manage our collection. We are lucky to experience many of the best aspects of library work. Every day brings new challenges and excitement.’
Mary, librarian, Hobart (Tasmania, Australia)
‘Your story in a few lines – arriving just before the blast, with a hint on the childhood and on the ‘destiny’ your family embodied in your roots
My life in a few lines? Oh God! I was a true soldier, serving in the army from about four years. Before that I’ve been at the art school, I had a sort of normal upbringing in the United Kingdom. I’ve got a slightly older brother and I was born in 1983.
From the blast to the blast (yes, you’ve read well): I think there is a long or better ‘absolute’ interval in which you’re between here (life) and there (death). Do you have any specific recall of it?
I remember everything I was conscious for. And I was conscious for a lot from the initial blast and things like that.
If you could associate a colour to that moment of your life, which could it be?
Yellow. Also iodine.
When you studied arts, did you have in mind in general to work in the field as…
An artist, not as a curator. I paint and draw, but at the moment I mainly write.
Anatomy of a Soldier is your first book. Do you prefer to define it a novel, or rather a collection of stories?
For affection, it’s a novel for me. I mean, I think, each chapter is yes dedicated to the life of a particular object, but is intended as interlinked and mirrored in any other of the book. The book has a definite narrative and a narrative pace.’
Harry Parker, writer (and former soldier), London
‘Urban planning is often tied with political sphere and I also remind something icing as the red pencil used by Stalin or other weird calculations. The relation with cubic meters, the urban plans…Is that a scientific or a social role?
It is a very fragile social-cultural task. Until the 80ies, at least in this country but not exclusively, the urban planner was facing a political sphere acting as mediator with social motions (and also as their interpreter). Majors and councillors were representing those requests via the democratic vote. So the motions were coming from the social body, not from the technician, the urban planner, called to put them in practice.
Nowadays urban planners often dialogue directly with the social realities. A strong element of their balance is the general interest, the ‘public city’, while dealing with the change of the existing fabrics.’
Henry Fontanari, architect, Venice
‘I was born in Schio (Vicenza province) on 1989 and I attended either the arts and the music college then I moved in Venice to enroll in the Fine Art Academy. I studied in the Atelier F, the school of Carlo di Raco, with whom most all the Venetian painter practiced. And How We Dwell kicked off from there. From a group of friends who met by chance in his class, a very uncommon study practice. The students can work there seven days a week, if they like, and also for the entire day. And they work all mixed. The beauty of this method is that the more expert young artists work with the younger. The ratio of the combination is for analogy of meanings, researches and interests. In this way I’ve met and knew well Cristiano and Marco, from whom I learned a lot. Our maturation has been parallel, also with Adriano (the other How We Dwell component). Between my fourth and fifth year at the Academy we moved on founding How We Dwell.’
‘We are three brothers…I’m the first one and my father called me Adamo as a second name, my sister got Eva and my brother got Abramo, but all the three of us are not ‘believers’, it’s a funny story and I love it.
I started producing art since I was a teenager but I got into the cinema industry because I wanted to learn and to improve the techniques and, possibly, to get a living while I was doing that. I was so lucky to meet – and to learn from – some great artists.
I’m not a fan of superheroes or of horror movies, I don’t watch TV series I don’t even have a TV since I was 21, I was always more interested in the artistry, in the process, in the materials and in the people behind those creations.
Every art piece I made came from a particular state of mind or from a difficult situation that triggered the need to reflect on something.’
Valter Adam, London
‘From New York to Venice it must be a radical shift but also the fulfilling of a dream, if I am not wrong…
They’re both islands! That’s my usual response to this question. There are a lot of similarities between the fast-walking, urbane populaces of both Venice and New York. And, of course, there are just as many differences. Venice’ pedestrian lifestyle, and the layout of the city at large, create a very interactive community. Since my first visit here, I’ve been taken with how very social Venetians are! Meanwhile, on the physical and geographical sides of life, I’m especially fond of the very easy access to the lagoon, local produce and local products that Venetians can enjoy. The Venetian lifestyle strikes me as much more natural than “radical”. Perhaps New York is radical. Surely it is. When I read Salvatore Settis’ book “If Venice Dies”, I realized that I have very much felt the impact of the differences between cities constructed for social participation, like Venice, versus cities whose design is more conducive to production than to community-building, like New York.’
Marjorie Sterne, former attorney and entrepreneur, New York and Venice
‘Eraldo (Affinati) and Anna Luce (Lenzi): your life before the foundation of Penny Wirton School?
We both graduated on Silvio D’Arzo, the author of the novel from which we borrowed the name of the school. The real expert on Silvio D’Arzo is Anna Luce Lenzi who is well known by the literary critics who worked on the writer from Reggio Emilia (Italy). We both have a literary background but w
e had also a strong pedagogic inclination moving us to found this peculiar school for immigrants.
And where are you after the errand you took around five years ago now?
The errand lasts since around ten years ago! Now we feel responsible of so many people who, passionate as us, move on the idea to teach Italian language to young migrants. We have the sensation that this free task can stimulate the main and better resources of our country.’
The School of Penny Wirton, Reggio Emilia
‘The desire to share with others and to feel that we belong to the same net. As child I had learned that participation is simple and fun. Participation describes perfectly the event of perception because it always involves at its most intimate level the experience of an active interplay between the perceiving body and that which perceives. There are no real divisions between the two, in many ways the thing perceived is an extension of the perceiver. We are in relationship to the outer and inner world. Communication, perception and environment cannot be separated and words are actions for us human beings. I feel that we all have to express our power in every thing we say or do without fear to be misinterpreted as perhaps aggressive or egotistical, because what hinders us to be actors is this background belief that we are separated and powerless.’
Anita Sieff, artist and filmmaker, Venice and New York
‘Since I graduated, I work for a social enterprise close to Padua dealing with reorientation.
My dream, however, is another: to be able to make a living with the activities I initiated with Closer, the charity I founded with my colleagues and friends of the high school (all the same age, born between 1990 and 1992: Leonardo Nadali, Nicolò Porcelluzzi, Luca Ruffato, Federico Tanozzi, Leonardo Azzolini).’
Giulia, Venice
‘Is it true that tears and blood have the same flavour, the same scent and the same temperature?
And they have the same taste, salty. We might have different colours in our skins or eyes, but we all are the same in the colour of our blood or tears. Then why all this fight on the earth? Everyone of us will eventually feed the soil with flesh, bones, blood and tears. Let’s hope the soil grow a better plant out of us.
Did you ever noted that Istanbul Istanbul, – if we exclude the terrific but horrible drawing of the map of the cells of the prison and its strata of atrocity sweetly melted in the aforementioned poetry and in irony – is the best touristic manifesto for this government and this city in this precise moment?
You made beauty prevailing over everything, including the worst kind of death.
When I began to write this novel, years ago, I didn’t expect it would be a current picture of today’s Turkey. Had I known it, would I change my mind or the plot? I don’t think so. Because, through the pain, I wanted to draw attention to the beauty – the beauty of the city, of the men, of the stories. I know the authorities try to get rid of beauty and glorify the pain while we try the opposite.’
Burhan Sönmez, writer, Ankara
‘Curiosity is a character trait I cherish.
My parents were neither interested in culture nor in arts because theirs is a typical post-war generation which trying to make a career starting out from nothing. There was not the time to learn more about art and literature – they were of course very interested but they could not cultivate it.
I owe all my interest in arts to my godmother from Cologne. I saw at her house some books on the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí who opened up my interests in art and from there I read any book I could put my hands on about him.
I even travelled to his house in Cadaques, Port Lligat, at that time he was still alive.
I sat on the beach where his house is, I even took a fallen tile from his wall to have something to bring back with me.
The deep interest in that world – the worlds of arts and literature – never left me.’
Thomas Girst, head of BMW Culture engagement and former publisher, Munich
‘I love the idea that you make of sun the best alley and friend, or the second ‘skin’ we should have, and it happens since your earlier projects where you made possible to anyone to use solar energy indoor without having big panels on the roof and just ‘wrapping’ surfaces like tables and windows with a special skin.
It’s something as well as natural as crucial that is incredible nobody thought to that before. You conjugated design and advanced technologies on solar energy. Beside the inspiration you could have had by your family interests, which has been your inner spark to work with sun as designer?
It is vital, it is a source of energy: it is everything.
It started when I read that the sunlight striking the earth’s surface in just one hour delivers enough energy to power the world economy for one year. It’s from there that I understood I wanted to work only with solar energy because there is so much potential in there for mankind than anywhere else.
The more I dealt in designing solar panels, the more I got the endless possibilities in this sector. We do not use them enough and it is now the time to start to think about this. People in the design field have to help to switch on this philosophy.’
Marjan van Aubel, Amsterdam
‘My story starts on June 6, 1982 when I was born. I come from a little countryside village, Orizaj, close to the old city Berat, in the
central-southern Albania. As my parents recall, I have been dumb until I was three years old and when I then started to speak I was fast and quite precise, I think because I was recovering the lost time. I did not start the primary school as the other children because I fell down from the fig three and I broke my leg, so I started from the second semester. My mother taught me and I owe to her the passion for wording even if she is an athlete – of a few words and very concrete.
All in all my childhood has been happy, I was playing with mud and invented original games as to create balls of yarn to be made from it and to be thrown on the ground with extreme power. I also recall I was always on bare feet, hurt with red stripes because I was used to run on the freshly plowed wheat fields.’
Jonida Prifti, poet, Orizaj and Rome
‘My process mostly starts with an intimate impulse in a specific situation of my life. It’s usually an idiosyncratic urge that wants to be transformed into something else, maybe into something beautiful. Beauty implies something social though because it includes a general or collective idea. If you say ‘I like it’ you mean that it’s your personal inclination. If you say ‘I think this is beautiful’, you imply that somebody else might also find it beautiful. Aesthetics and ethics make a tricky couple. Their inscrutable relationship might be the main trigger for what we call art. This is directly linked to another relationship that interests me a lot, the one between individual and society. That’s where the political aspect starts for me, where my sculptural work has its roots. Sculpture needs a place. And a place has the potential for encounter. I love the intimate quality of art that evokes self-awareness. And I believe in the poetic energy of art that enriches and activates a society.’
Florian Graf, artist, Basel
‘I was born 32 years ago in Alexandria by Egyptian parents, I have a five years old daughter and I am very proud of her! When I was around 2 and half I came in Italy living between Modena and Reggio (where we finally settled, so I had all my school time there, this is the city in which I still live).
I am graduated in languages (English and French) but I also got in depth with my mother tongue (classic Arabic) during my university and also with the Persian, it is a stunning language for its medley with English (it is a North European language!). I loved to return back to the origins of this study, especially for my mother tongue. I found in this new relation with it an unexpected wideness and depth, dense and full of beautiful meanings.
I started to work where I am now just after my degree and so, since then, I deal with intercultural projects. (Marwa is responsible of intercultural education for Fondazione Mondinsieme of Reggio Emilia Council).
Marwa Mahmoud, Reggio Emilia
‘I got very interested in your life – it is short given you’re only 25 years old – but I crave to read only what is not finding space in gossip magazines or in fashion outlets where you’re very often portrayed and told. I crave to read the very inner Marcantonio, the one is often left untold. I knew already you studied abroad and that you started to travel very early.
These 25 years have been flowing very quickly for different reasons. First of all, because I left home at 16 to study in a boarding school. And, then, because I’ve been quite spoiled (in a certain sense I’m still quite spoiled, but now I’m ‘independent’). Everything a youngster could have been living now, I did already before him. And therefore now I’m ready to settle and to have a family and sons.
I got very passioned with a city which I really hated before and I’m convinced that here you’re free to set and create what you wish because there is an incredible potential. I speak of Venice.
I was not loving Venice as a kid because I wanted to have a different life – when you are a teenager you blow your mind with splendor, journeys, parties, women, disco clubs and drugs. Back in those years, I hated Venice because she was denying me all those cliches. And also because when I was 14 Venice could not give what she gives me now, now that I’m changed.
Yes, I traveled a lot. I studied in Switzerland and then in London and, lately, I spent six months in Argentina.
Design has a double aim for me, like glass. It is important to design lamps, or vases, because I work in Murano. In a smaller scale, that island for me is the actual world: many companies are so selfish – and they have a very old mentality. Many entrepreneurs do not read the insane potential they hold in their hands. To succeed to do what we do (‘we’ are a team, I’m not alone at Laguna B) is, in that small scale, something like to change the world. What I am doing with glass can be done on any other product, I mean really any: from spare tires to bananas to French fries.
I returned very happily back to Venice, I have to say, afte this long pilgrimage. I had truly chosen her.
Marcantonio Brandolini D’Adda, entrepreneur, Venice
‘I am a Northern Irish, Edinburgh-living, slow-reading, brainy, happy, greying, wanderlusting, restless, vain, gentle filmmaker and writer who was brought up in Belfast during the Troubles, who studied film, art and philosophy, who has been with the same woman for three decades, whose film themes are walking, children, recovery and innovation, who has two books coming out in Italian (The Story of Film and The Story of Looking), who is completing a film on Orson Welles, who has climbed to the Hollywood sign naked,
whose favourite artist is Tintoretto, who is an honorary professor of film, who is influenced by surrealism, who is easily bored, whose favourite writer is James Joyce, and whose favourite filmmaker is Imamura Shohei.’
Mark Cousins, director, Edinburgh
‘When somebody asks you, in a salon, what do you do, which is your profession, do you answer ‘the poet’?
No, I answer that I’m a journalist, I do not like to draw attention. Anyway, I always felt poets as woodworkers or tailors, who work until the burn-out on details which maybe nobody will pay attention to.’
Alberto Pellegatta, Milan and Barcelona
‘You as a reader: which places, which needs, which books with you now
I read passionately and all the time, background analysis about what is happening (example: writings by Gustavo Esteva, México), theoretical books (example: Ivan Illich, one of the most important thinkers of the last century, he should be read a lot more), and a many novels -including crime novels. Novels –and to some extent also films- open up worlds, present or past, and help to understand the present. Recently, I have been reading Jack Kerouac, Paul Auster and Jane Austen. And recovering some of my Italian (language of my childhood), Camilleri’s “La mossa del cavallo”, a novel set in the past in Sicily (Sicily is a most inspiring island), and, with a particular interest, Giorgio Fontana’s “Morte di un uomo felice”: it is about past political violence and resistance in Italy (Slow Words interviewed Giorgio Fontana once he won a very famous literary Prize, Campiello on 2014, we explored in our way from many viewpoints).’
Benno Glauser, anthropologist and professor, Paraguay
‘If it is possible to know, where do you see yourself in ten years given that there is the ‘Brexit’ on your door…? Will you still be thinking of England as your favourite place to be?
I’m always rethinking that, not just because of Brexit. I have always been divided between Australia and England, let’s say London really. I suspect I will settle back in Australia. It’s very easy living in Australia, it’s less pressurized, less overwhelming (which is the appeal of London; there is so much happening there! And so much is available! But, at the same time, it is also good to get out of there).
I suppose Australia is my homeland, it is where I am accustomed, it’s where I have friends and family…It has a draw, but it has also an easy living. I anticipate that I will return there.’
Elisabeth Malone, lawyer and patron, London and Perth
‘Why Taipei and Asia? What it gives to you and what do you seem to give back to it?
Taiwan enjoys the most freedom of expression, especially in creativity industry. There is absolutely no censorship of whatsoever. And as for Taipei, it is a true cradle for it. My job is to secure the best creative and productive environment for the artists and filmmakers I work with. Many exciting things are happenings in Asia besides the seemly plenty of capitals flouting around for arts, having said that, there are still areas of improvement, in terms of taking authenticity and originality into accounts in creativity.’
Jeane Huang, film developer, Taipei
‘As journalist and founder of two important papers, which is your opinion regarding the relation readership-social networks and more in general of the future of the classical way of reading a paper?
In Britain and most of Europe the classical way of reading a newspaper is dying out. It will survive in pockets but it is declining irrevocably, which is a kind of tragedy. For well over a century, newspaper reading was fundamental to our way of life. There were Left-wing, Right-wing and Centrist titles which reflected political and cultural points of view. Typically, people took one, maybe two, newspapers, and they read them thoroughly, and sometimes passed them around among family and friends. Nowadays the reader of online newspapers is more likely to be promiscuous, and will visit multiple websites in a very short period of time. Online newspapers – at any rate the free ones – are not organs of opinion or even comprehensive news in the way that printed ones have been. The consequences for society are bound to be profound.’
Stephen Glover, writer and journalist, Oxford
‘If, ideally, you wish to give a suggestions to whom changes his/her body with plastic surgery nowadays, which could it be? Which canon of beauty or which degree of independence from any ‘canon’ will you wish?
I made that series of works on that subject (since the 90s the French artist subjected her body to countless plastic surgeries to resemble to various icons of the Renaissance and further) not for a personal reasons but for my works of art. It was, in short, to put a figure on my face, i.e. a representation, and to make for myself a new image in order to make new images as the Pre-Colombian, Amer-Indian, African self-hybridizations, and again, like the masks of the Beijing opera, facing design and augmented reality.’
Orlan, artist, all over the world but French
‘Your way into percussions is like a ‘plasticist’, like a carver. You make the sound and you accompany it toward the next stage. Because you feel that music is not only a state of mind but a way to share energy. That’s why the percussions? Was this only possible in this range of ‘orchestra’ roles, even if you perform often solo?
It’s like that: for me music is energy and character but at the same time sensitivity and intimacy. The music is communication: through it you can express so many states of mind, I would even say that it is like a medicine.
Without sound this world – and us, the humans – would maybe not exist. The music is also movement, rhythm. Our heart has also a constant pulse.
But, moreover and first of all, music is life!’
Simone Rubino (1993), percussionist, Turin
‘What do you give to your city and what your city gives to you?
Well, my life is interwoven with this city and therefore my life is an expression of the cities pulse. A year ago my son was born. The doctor who gave him birth was the son of the doctor who helped me to come to the light of the world. I moved away from Stuttgart a couple of times – and I kept coming back. Each time reentering circles I had left, rediscovering people and places that played a role in my life at an earlier stage. I think the city and me we live in frequencies of resonance.’
Angela Warnecke, artist and manager, Stuttgart
‘Where do you see yourself in 10 years from now? Will you still be so proud to act in this multilayered ways or to explore new places?
Two years ago, before I got this actual job, I was questioning myself if I was always having the right energetic level to keep it – the teaching, the djing, the activism – all at a once!
When you get a full tenure track job as I got it, it is a very rare finding that you would like to keep.
There is another thing: being in the music scene at 44, it seems I am ‘too’ old so sometimes is hard to share with the youngsters because they see you more as a mentor than a performer beside them (and especially if you’re a female this happens more, the music scene is still a very ‘male’ dominated one and you happen to be forgotten very quickly if you do not perform often, this is tiring).’
Larisa Mann, dj and professor, New York and Philadelphia
‘Your relation with fabrics and textures is really new, if we look at the Italian tailors tradition (and especially at the South Italian one) you shape it in a more unconventional way: how do you choose the fabric, how do you taste, smell and interpret them?
The best fabrics have been done by the British, in my opinion. And also the best shoes.
I love their weights, their robustness, their physical qualities.
The Italian fabric is, as you correctly say, more conventional. This is because in Italy dresses are used to be nicer and cooler. Even more nice and more cool than what we are in the intimacy.
The Britons have never been interested in getting noted, on the contrary they aimed to be remembered.
And you can leave a recall of you, also permanent, much more if you’re silent rather than if you shout.’
Valentino Ricci, fashion designer and entrepreneur, Bitonto
‘Which is your relation with the readers once you read your pieces? Do you prefer the way to receive feedbacks in the face / de visu or via the mediated relations on social networks?
I’m a somewhat introverted and quiet person so I prefer silence as a general state. But as I live and sell stories, my relationship with readers is one where we both help each other, so I cruise around and talk with people. It is also fun when the people enjoy the stories, so this keeps me excited too.
There is lots of hand selling too: I have always lots of One Dollar Story in my bag all the time. There is always, such a lot of personal interactions.
Every time we have a new story, we have a premiere as well as every time there is a new video of mine. We drink a lot, we have fun and it usually works: lots of people come along, either the ones who I do not see often and the ones I do and new people I meet.’
Galen DeKemper, publisher and writer at One Dollar Stories, New York
‘Your life in a few lines, with a peculiar accent on where you were born and grew up
I was an ordinary kid – sensitive and introverted but at the same time curious and sociable: music, playing soccer and hippopotamuses were my great passions.
My father was a workaholic lawyer (I was so certain to do not get stuck in the same habit but actually I am not very sure of having being able to). We’re really carnally attached – my grandpa was used to tease us (in Neapolitan: ma c’ata fa’ cu tutte ‘sti uommeche…stop with these sweet nothings). I lost my dad Carlo too early and I think of him very often. He would be happy now that his idea to avoid me to work in his sector (courts, papers…) by pushing me at any time to follow my not linear, evanescent paths brought me to have some tangible and fulfilling results now.’
Giogiò Franchini, film editor, Naples
‘When the situationist derive took over and therefore you founded Morbid Books and, then, A Void? And why? Especially why a format of interviews shaken with very subtle poems for your literary magazine A Void?
Despite my outspoken criticisms of bourgeois culture, I really enjoy reading the non-fiction features in high-end magazines such as the New Yorker and Playboy, as well as independent, countercultural and punk magazines. And besides a couple of rare exceptions, poetry magazines have dreadful aesthetics. So when Edmund Davie and I decided that I should make a magazine for the poetry experiments we were engaged in between Poet for Hire commissions, my instinct took over and I ended up incorporating not only poetry in an exciting visual aesthetic, but also non-fiction features about underground people and ideas, but in a popular and accessible style.’
Lewis Parker, A Void – London
‘Word is the fundamental of everything constitutes our humanity. Our words are important even when we speak of things may not seem so important. The expression, the ways, the tones we choose are essential for the quality of our relation and of our life in general.
Words, when they come to be very low and coward, put us toward the degradations of our humanity and our thinking. Music, as poetry and literature, is – as ultimate reason – the sentinel of this so fragile condition which is always on the edge between elevation and collapse.’
Stefania Tarantino, philosopher and musician, Naples
‘After two year being enrolled at the chefs school and after the four years working for Japanese restaurants in your country…
I was understanding that I was in love with pasta!
Every day I was free from my job, usually the Sundays, I was always going to eat Italian food…and at the end I ended working in an Italian restaurant. I worked in Kobe, in my native town and in Hiroshima.
Then I struggled to really learn Italian cuisine where it originates. So here.
I traveled from Japan to Florence: I was not speaking Italian, I was not even able to understand how to take the buses and so I was used to walk back and forward from the school, each time 5 km.
I was at that time 26: Italy has been my first foreign destination and I was also very scared from strangers.’
Masahiro Homma, chef in Venice
(Find out more at www.slow-words.com)
Their and our slow words are committing to the same aim: to feel and achieve the qualities of life and dreams at any latitude without any discrimination or border.
We read and translate for you poets, writers and songwriters from further more cities. Often unpublished, our selected literature browses any literary tradition and any century with a special interest for authors at their first novel.
On the year 2017 we also brought again our fans in very unusual places in order to let them know in person the writers we interviewed and select while tasting good food and listening to good music. Our readers’ club are a joy and always free.
Our true stories are giving you new perspectives. Nobody will collect the same stories we do.
We, people of this world, can make a difference.
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