I have a small dog at my home in Italy. She looks quite like a mouse. She has an extravagant golden toupee, and as her predecessors, she has a genetic predisposition toward human feet cleaning. As soon as she sees a foot without a sock, she runs after it wagging her tail until it stops, and she with her tiny tongue starts her passionate work. While she does so, she closes her eyes as to say 'what more could I ask from life?'.
Her name is Birba.
A few years ago I read for the first time “Rabbit hill” by Richard Adams. For me it wasn't only a great book but the symbol of literary challenge. I'll try to explain myself. Adams wanted as a cast for his novel nothing else but a bunch of rabbits and a piece of land. He wrote a book that is 500 pages long. A good book. The day I will be able to write a good book of five hundred pages about a pack of tissues, a snail and a desk I'll be happy. I will be happy because I would have learned how to give value to every single trail living or in-animated objects leave behind them.
In the book Adam sometimes uses made up words such as “nifritz” or “ramonlà”. And often while I was reading Birba was there, taking care of my feet. And so it was Birbafritz.
When an animation is created, for example a flash animation, you have to fixate key poses. Successively the program will create automatically all the missing frames between the two key poses, creating the effect of movement. This technique is reinterpreting the way to create stories through images as Walt Disney did with his first animations. The master cartoon drawer, drew the key poses of the characters in the cartoon. Afterwards the students would complete by hand the missing drawings in between the two poses. A novel has very much in common with this modus operandi, even though unifying the points indicates the real creativity of the author and how that have been placed indicate the audacity of the work. This is for me the meaning of photography: a pleasant dot that gives us the urge to trace a line, for an unknown destination. The dream of an awaited holiday but not yet decided, the curiosity of knowing what that pretty girl is looking at, the will to imagine the story lived by that old man who now is sitting alone on a bench.
Birbafritz