It is undeniable that image is everything in our world: we all abide to this modern truism and sadly too often forget the power of words in favour of visual stimuli. Yet one of the most powerful tools we may ever use against ignorance and superficiality is a dictionary. Usually filed in the reference section of bookshops, monolingual, bilingual, technical and illustrated dictionaries offer information on words and grammar and very good ones become friends for life.
To refocus the attention of younger generations on the power of words and of dictionaries in particular, Italian publishing house Zanichelli - known in Italy for a quintessential Italian product, the Zingarelli dictionary - turned to Antonio Marras.
In a world in which students favour smartphones and computers to books and struggle to relate to thick tomes (up until 30 years ago you would easily find one or two dictionaries, often by Zanichelli, in all Italian households, but nowadays you would struggle to find even an old one), the publishing house decided it was time to raise awareness about the importance of preserving a language by turning to a fashion designer and artist.
The publisher sent therefore around 30 copies of their dictionaries to Marras and the Sardinian designer proceeded to transform them into artworks.
Marras has a passion for tangible things and materials: if you've ever sat down to interview him, you've probably witnessed him doodling on a notebook while chatting and occasionally using his espresso to paint.
The task was a bit daunting at the beginning as Marras didn't know how to approach things, but, little by little, he developed a theme - the sense of loss, almost a mourning feeling for language extinction - and, using his passion for different materials, transformed 16 copies of the Zingarelli dictionaries he was sent. The results were unveiled this week at the Circolo Marras (via Cola di Rienzo), the Milan-based atelier of the designer.
Marras stated in a press release that for inspiration he moved from disciplines such as art, dance, poetry, cinema, theatre and literature and from different figures, including dance choreographer Pina Bausch, naturalist Eva Mameli Calvino and Nobel Prize-winner writer Grazia Deledda.
At times he opened the volumes at a certain page and pierced the pages with nuts and bolts; in other case he poured concrete on an open tome and added some toy soldiers, almost recreating a small scene from the First World War trenches.
He added doddles, collages, sketches and cuts, burnt this or that page, applied fabric and gauze to one dictionary, almost to symbolise the fact that our languages are broken and fractured and we are losing the possibility of communicating, and glued cactus spikes to one cover and dolls eyes to another to remind that words are powerful things and that a dictionary is a sort of friendly guardian of a language. Marras created his own visual and tactile codes and applied them to the language code locked in the Zingarelli dictionaries.
Word purists may not like the fact that the designer more or less destroyed the tomes, but his intervention calls to mind the work of the late Sardinian artist Maria Lai, who became a friend, muse and collaborator of Marras.
The fashion designer's dictionaries are mixes of different materials, calling to mind Lai's "Telai" (Looms), assemblages of wires, scraps of fabric, wood and everyday objects, artworks inspired by the primitive elements of Sardinian culture.
The volumes remind of Lai's bread encyclopedia, notebooks and books made of fabric and integrating pieces of ceramic and paper or featuring fabric pages covered in embroidered texts.
Marras' stratified and layered Zingarelli dictionaries covered in dirty and drawings become messages to fight against banality and superficiality: they are eccentric and extreme, made useless by the interventions of the artist, but they have a core message, easy to grasp - culture is never unfashionable, so open up your dictionaries and get to know your languages more.
The life of this project is somehow limited as eight of the 16 works of art (on display until 21st November at the Circolo Marras) will be auctioned during a charity event at the Mudec museum in Milan on 13th November, but this exercise could prove inspiring for other publishers.
Fashion designers in the past created covers for limited editions of novels (remember for example how five tales by Beatrix Potter were republished in 2016 with covers by five fashion designers?), so the time has probably come for publishers to relaunch dictionaries maybe wrapped in designer covers. Who knows, grammar school students struggling with their Latin and Greek would maybe be more willing to open their classical language dictionaries if they knew they had been dressed, decorated and repackaged by their favourite artists and designers.
All images in this post by Daniela Zedda
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