Convocazione

Antonio Barrese - 1996
Talking to Giovanni Anceschi, I think in 1989 or 1990, I asked him why, in his opinion, books are always in the same form, irrespective of their content. Why do a book of poems and a book on astronomy have the same sort of page make-up? Is there some economic cause? Are publishers simply lacking in resources? Are graphic designers so unimaginative? Why has visual poetry never outgrown the confines of a single page? And why, lastly, though having the most powerful tool that we’ve ever had (the computer), do we use it without giving full rein to its expressive potential, without really exploiting what it could do? I’m convinced that a substantial part of creativity comes from the tools you have, from studying their actual and potential uses and from efforts to develop original ways of using them. Anyway, around a decade later, in 1998, I finished La convocazione, a complex visual novel in nine chapters, to which Giovanni Anceschi wrote the preface.