“Not only the future is speculative, but also possible presents and pasts.”

— Jared Sexton

Is it still possible to think of a future? And are there alternatives to the paralysis of the present in the future? Don’t we risk becoming entangled in an idea of progress which clearly keeps showing its limits ?

Perhaps, instead of looking forward, we should try looking sideways, to find out  that “adjacent worlds” exist, worlds whose potential lies in the fact that they are already here. 

Mondi accanto (adjacent worlds) is the title of the third edition of the festival. At its core there’ll be Nicole Claveloux’s work, French illustrator and cartoonist  between the most influential of the last 40 years, to whom a major retrospective will be dedicated

Adjacent worlds are an invite to change our position and posture: “Displacement, I believe, involves a kind of lateral speculation, rather than projection forward in time. Keeping that in mind, I’ve come to see my own writing as ‘adjacent to reality’ rather than futuristic—placing my speculations beside the present rather than in front of it.”

These are words of writer and scholar Elvia Wilk Elvia Wilk, whose essay Death by Landscape (Italian edition: Narrazioni dell’estinzione, ADD Editore, 2023) accompanied us in the thought process of the festival.

It is all about moving away from a forecasting mindset and adopting an exploratory one—trying to practice detouring as a form of wandering, concentrating on what apparently seems just a detail, a small hidden world, an unfamiliar perspective. Adjacent worlds can be imaginary and imaginative alternatives, but also reverberations of a past that has been lived or concrete presences today, such as childhood walking alongside us. But these are always side tracks, which can cast doubts on the condition of the present experienced as imperative and necessary. 

Is it really impossible to live and imagine in any other way?

Thanks to her unparalleled graphic and chromatic energy and irrepressible expressive freedom, Nicole Claveloux has always stood out as a builder, and at the same time destroyer, of worlds: her universes are crazy and multifaceted as her techniques and the variety of her stories. They stay adjacent to our reality or, in some cases, inside it.

It is no coincidence that the title of the festival edition concurs with that of the main exhibition: in this way, we want to emphasize the contemporary and forward-looking nature of a fundamental and absolutely atypical figure in the international comic and illustration scene. “Mondi accanto” (Adjacent Worlds), Nicole Claveloux’s first major exhibition in Italy, in the former Church of San Mattia, is accompanied by the release of the book La mano verde e altre storie (The Green Hand and Other Stories) by Eris Edizioni, the first real opportunity for the Italian public to read her work.

The artist's familiarity with the fantastic and the freedom it grants brings her into contact with the deepest, truest, and wildest part of childhood. Claveloux knows how to be “by childhood’s side” in a place of participatory observation and absolute play, pure, physical fun, heedless of the proper thinking of the adult eye. 

On the side of childhood but also on that of women. In her work girls, young women, and women take their place in society without asking, speaking their minds, doing everything that the male gaze would not want, claiming their bodies, their pleasures, adventures, weaknesses and follies. Reclaiming once again the transformative power of drawing.

It is an opportunity to enter a metamorphic and visionary universe, capable of combining Carroll and feminism, fantasy and childhood.  Thus, comics follow paths that have only recently been recognized in literature—think of Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology (Pm pr, 2015) (Italian edition: Le Visionarie, NERO Editions, 2019) , edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer—for their alternative and somewhat prophetic value.