The illustrator Noemi Vola teaches children to observe the little things that surround us

Childhood is often talked about as though its most important feature were the fact that it’s only a temporary state: so, for example, we often hear of children being referred to as the “citizens of tomorrow”. In other words, in the popular imagination they are like caterpillars that will soon turn into butterflies. This leads the adult world not to consider them as people with particular needs and desires of their own, who need to be listened to seriously. But if, instead, we began to consider them on a par with worms, what do you think might change?

The category of children is, to some extent, similar to that of “artists”, precisely because they are categories that are not often taken seriously by some adults who believe there must always be an end, a purpose. But who says that it always has to be this way? No one knows why we exist on this Earth and all too often we forget we are just tiny little people walking on the surface of a planet that’s floating in an infinitely vast universe. That’s why, in addition to not taking ourselves too seriously, we ought to make more space in our lives for things that make no sense, for what can’t be explained or programmed, for what is useless and has no purpose, for what exists today in one form but might exist tomorrow in a form that’s completely different. A new way of reasoning might open up whole new perspectives from which to observe things.

During the workshop in the Summer Escapes project at Triennale, you offered the children a project in which a large part of it was devoted to observation. Armed only with notebooks, the children raced off to a frenzied competition in which they tried see who could find the most details in the Triennale garden – an area that, even though fascinating, is nevertheless quite small. How did such a simple task arouse so much enthusiasm?

The idea of asking the children to write down in their notebooks all the things they could see around them came to me when thinking of Georges Perec’s famous lists. In particular, when looking at a square in Paris, Perec notes that there are lots of things, and adds that “[...] many, if not most, of these things have already been described, classified, photographed, told or reviewed”. But his aim was to go beyond the things that are seen immediately, at a first glance. What he attempts to do is to “[...] describe the rest: what is normally not noticed, what is not observed, what is of no importance: what happens when nothing happens, except for the weather, people, cars and clouds.”

What I find fascinating about this observation exercise is that you can do it anywhere, wherever you are, whenever you like. Whatever the place, whether it’s somewhere we know well (or rather, that we think we know well) or somewhere that doesn’t seem to have anything interesting in it, there’s always lots to find – much more than one might think. Writing down, black on white, what it is simply there, helps us realise how much we can discover simply by observing things better, and going to look in the most hidden places. This discovery always surprises us: that’s why it’s so exciting for everyone, not just children. 

The second part of the workshop involved modelling, with an action that you’ve already explored in your work. What are the main differences between two and three dimensions? Between illustrating and modelling?

When you’re modelling, you can never go wrong, because the material you are working with is changeable and malleable, and you can work it indefinitely. This encourages you to try out new and different forms, to destroy what you’ve done and start over again when you aren’t satisfied, without being in a rush to create something definitive. What is more, three-dimensional modelling has the advantage that you don’t have to worry about some aspects such as the composition of the image or the background, which can both complicate the construction of an illustration and, in some cases, even make it impossible. So, if you’re modelling a particular subject, you can mainly concentrate on that alone, without worrying about the rest. You sometimes find that the “background” is quite simply the space it’s in, which is to say a space that already exists: it’s fascinating to see how what we’ve created with our own hands can be placed in and interact with the landscape around it.

Noemi Vola, born in 1993, is an Italian author and illustrator. With Corraini Edizioni, she has published Da Qui a Molto Lontano, Un libro di cavalli rivoluzionari and Un orso sullo stomaco, winner of the Premio Nazionale Nati per Leggere award in 2018 and selected, that same year, for the exhibition 100 Outstanding Picturebooks curated by dPICTUS at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Her book FIM? Isto nao açaba assim (Planeta Tangerina) won the International Serpa Picturebook Prize in 2017. In 2019 she was selected for the Illustrators Exhibition at the Children’s Book Fair in Bologna. She has worked with various publishing companies in Italy and abroad, including Bruaá Editora, Danchu Press, Vogue Bambini, Smemoranda and Kuš!