There are no limits, obstacles, barriers: not even the isolation from Covid-19 can stop the strength of words. From ink on paper to the digital world, the essence doesn’t change. The instruments are different, but not their ability to cross real or virtual boundaries. If it’s true that the tongue kills more than the sword, it’s also true that a sentence can revolutionise the history of humanity (think about Martin Luther King’s I have a dream). So it happens that, in a period of social distancing, being enclosed between four walls can lead to an opening up. Cittadellarte, through the coordinator of the project Rebirth Saverio Teruzzi, has launched the initiative Fairy tales from the world, inviting Third Paradise ambassadors/dresses and Fondazione Pistoletto’s ‘citizens’ to populate websites and social networks with a series of videos created for the occasion. Contributions can be of any kind: each participant is proposing a fairy tale, a poem or a nursery rhyme; it doesn’t matter if they have authored them themselves or not. What matters is the sharing of a text they consider significant, preferably addressed to the youngest audience. What makes this initiative global is not only its online modality – for once technology is reducing distances and bringing people closer – but the fact that the videos are in the participants’ mother tongues. We have now reached the tenth episode: we have had videos in Finnish, Hebrew, Urdu, Spanish and Italian, and we will soon have (spoiler alert) stories shared in German, Arabic and Bosnian.
“The initiative ‘Fairy tales from the world’ – Saverio told us – conveys the characteristics of the dual relationship 1+1=3, which is at the basis of the sign-formula of the Third Paradise. I was searching for contents able to provide instruments for the activities of both the Rebirth ambassadors/dresses and families in this unexpected and unprecedented global situation in which #iorestoacasa has become the most prominent feature in our lives. It was then that the ambassadress Iole D’Agostino sent me a video in which she had recorded herself reading a fairy tale, as a remote didactic activity addressed to nursery schools. Putting two and two together logically led to the launch of ‘Fairy tales from the world’, inviting Third Paradise ambassadors/dresses and Cittadellarte’s staff to donate a tool for parents through social media, reading, recounting or reciting a fairy tale they are emotionally attached to, from their traditions and cultures, in their mother tongue wherever possible”.
