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Dátum zverejnenia: Oct 08, 2019 6:32:31 PM
A Diary for the Kids' Universal Exhibition
by Vittorio Vandelli
Since we are fellow-teachers and friends, Mr. Costes and I have been in constant contact in these last few years. So I happened to follow his ‘crazy idea’ – the creation of the Kids Universal Exhibition – since its beginning, from the embryonal stage to the fully developed Eramus + project we have today. From utopia it became reality thanks to the stubbornness of its creator who could not accept to watch our world running towards self-destruction and stand still. The starting idea was to overturn the common notion that technology is against nature; on the contrary, it is possible to show that we can use it to help nature survive and better itself. Mr. Costes’ vision started with the experiments he made in his school with his pupils as Science and Technology teacher: to a profane like me, his composteur machine, for example, was a strange incomprehensible object which, nonetheless, creates material which can be used to make plants grow indoor where no natural elements are found. Yes, technology properly used, instead of just spoiling nature, can help it improve, and this, in itself, is a revolutionary fact. After visiting my school in Italy, he discovered that in another and different reality other teachers, green-institutions and local municipalities were making things like that, and he realized he was no more just a dreamer. Fuelled by this discovery, with the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci (by the way, this year we celebrate his 500 anniversary), Mr. Costes started his virtual and physical wandering throughout European schools a couple of years ago, a solitary traveller like a modern Prometheus. Today the deed is done, and the foolish idea has become reality, just when the young people all over the world are striking against climate change.
So now the project is alive and kicking, a message of hope and awareness to the younger generations, and this Kids Universal Exhibition, and all the run-up to it in the following two years, is not going to be only a show of technological green events, but also, and mainly, it is going to be about the spreading of the idea that “yes we can” – if we want to. But here is the rub: physically we can involve only a limited number of kids and teachers. To help us spread the news to the world, to launch our project everywhere, we need again a mixture of technology and tradition: writing and the Internet. Ever since the dawn of civilisation, writing has been the means to share ideas and create history and heritage. Today, thanks to the Internet, our little contribution to sustainable development or to happy degrowth can be delivered to every door. As in the past, we daresay that reality does not exist if it is not described and fixed in written form, there to remain, a little piece of rock part of the bigger wall of knowledge. Hence, the need for a diary of the Exhibition.
As appointed diarist, again in the spirit of this enterprise, I have decided to use a writing style which is, obviously, modern in content and lexis, but at the same time a homage to literary tradition in form, so as to establish a link between the past and the present. I come from the Italian “motor valley”, the town of Modena, Emilia-Romagna, home of the Ferrari and Maserati cars. What is the feeling aroused, for example, by the parades of Ferrari’s vintage cars we sometimes have in my town? The spectator surely feels that this is a homage to tradition, to a past that has shaped today’s reality, filled with the inevitable irony of re-staging an old-fashioned world but also with languid nostalgia. So, as a teacher of English and an author, I’ll try to use a form – if not a style – which pays homage to the birth of fiction in the XVIII and XIX century: the intent is to write of hi-tech matters in an old fashioned form: the irony implicit in this is, in my opinion, a good way to boost the message and to state, in between the lines, that we are not just visionary lunatics, but that we take advantage of traditional technology and try to use the contemporary one to walk the green pattern and “save the world”: this utopia must be the stimulus to the real world, Sir Thomas Moore docet. There are many features in the fiction and non-fiction traditional writers I may use for my writing: the diary form in itself was widely used and the epistolary form too may fit my purpose. When we read Frankenstein by Mary Shelly or Richardson’s sentimental novels we are actually reading a collection of letters and diary entries. When we read Henry Fielding or Charles Dickens we meet an omniscient narrator that not only carries on the plots of the novels, but directly steps into the narration with a series of digressions that are moral comments on the subject-matter he is narrating. A technique like that could be used with profit in my report, provided this vintage technique is clearly distinguishable for the reader. I don’t know if I’ll make it, but at least I’ll try.
Yes, we are crazy because we want to – try and – save the world, we are utopians in a world whose near future has been described by dystopian writers in their fiction as grim and gloomy, if we do not act. We don’t want to live in the Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-four’s antidemocratic, polluted, violent and repressive society. We don’t want to live in a Blade Runner social order, the dark world in which plants and animals have disappeared, the earth is about to be destroyed by pollution, people are deported to other planets to make mankind survive and artificially made men-machines – the replicants – have more feelings than real people.
That’s why we want to, at least metaphorically, save the world and write our electronical message in the bottle in the world wide web: it is a grain of sand in a beach, but what is a beach made of in the end?
And don’t forget: never give up a dream!
Vittorio Vandelli
Toulon, September 27, 2019
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