A Farnesina project to promote the Italian language and culture around the world.
‘Hugo Pratt. L’eredità, l’opera e la biografia’
Categories: Language and education -Visual Arts -Literature and Publishing
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation has launched the project “Hugo Pratt. L’eredità, l’opera e la biografia” (Hugo Pratt. The legacy, the work and the biography) to promote the Italian language and culture around the world through one of the most important Italian comic artists.
Promoted by the Directorate General for Public and Cultural Diplomacy in collaboration with Cong Sa (the company that owns the rights to Pratt’s work), the project is aimed at pupils in 49 Italian schools around the world and in 85 Italian sections in foreign schools. The students are invited to participate in a competition to write a new unpublished adventure for Corto Maltese, Pratt’s most famous character, by developing a short story or a script for a comic, which will then be produced by illustrators selected by Cong Sa. The covers of the stories that come second and third will be published. The classes taking part in the competition will participate in three training sessions with the writer Marco Steiner and with the comic book artist Giuseppe Camuncoli.
The winning entries will be exhibited among the contemporary art works of the “Farnesina Collection” at the MAECI, before being included in a travelling exhibition focused on Corto Maltese, alongside drawings by Pratt and illustrations by successive illustrators over the years, which will be organised by the Italian Cultural Institutes between 2023 and 2024.
Hugo Pratt is the ideal author for a project to deepen and enhance Italian culture and history, and to revive dialogue between generations. For me, as for many people, the passion for this artist was born in childhood, with a gift: Una ballata del mare salato, in which the character Corto Maltese appears for the first time
says Alessandro De Pedys, Central Director for the Promotion of Culture and the Italian Language, in the podcast dedicated to the project that will be published on the Spreaker channel Voci dalla the Farnesina.
Hugo Pratt’s connection with Italian schools abroad has distant roots and goes back to his attendance, since childhood, at the Italian school of Addis Ababa. For these reasons, a search in the Historical Diplomatic Archives of the Farnesina for unpublished documents on the artist’s biography was also launched as part of the project, with the aim of creating an exhibition-dossier dedicated to him.
Read the announcement on esteri.it (deadline for entries: 15 November 2022)
