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News Archive
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12/10/2009 Light Tales CompetitionThe first Light Tales competition has finally found its winners. However, it is worth noting that at least ten essays were on the shortlist of favourites, demonstrating the overall excellent quality of the submissions to the competition.Congratulations to the winner, Gianna Batistoni (Italy), with her story entitled Albaluna. Basar Erdener (Turkey) was the runner-up with his essay, How I Started to See. Another Italian writer, Giorgio Cattano, came third with Una luce sola. The panel of judges also assigned an honourable mention to L’incontro by Paolo Portaluri (Italy) for the mixed-media artwork illustrating his text. A tale told through images, preceded by a few verses. Nevertheless, the honour goes to the illustration and writing together, since the verses provide a necessary key to understanding the story that Portaluri suggests through a succession of five panels depicting a human figure and its reflected image, which becomes sharper from frame to frame, a lamp, a bottle… and light, especially light. The panels transition through the bright light of day, light cast by a lamp, twilight before nightfall, and finally, the low light of the moon. Tender and very well written, the work by Gianna Batistoni pulls at the heartstrings. Albaluna is a little girl with an extreme sensitivity to light, “a veil of pale silk that the sun yellows and consumes,” a “paper doll made of tissue” that her grandmother keeps indoors, protected from sunlight. Albaluna has never seen other children and “looking into the mirror, she had the strange notion that human beings changed colour as they got older, that children were little unripe fruits and, as time brought her closer to maturity, she too would have long chestnut coloured hair…” Then one day she met another child by chance and caught a glimpse of a new world, outside of her home, sparking her desire to discover a possible new light. Even for her, for whom daytime is forbidden. The beautiful story develops with grace and sensitivity, with light emerging as a precious gift. Natural or artificial, real or metaphorical, light is life! This message, and how the author manages to convey it, made this essay worthy of first prize. Writers participated in this competition for the opportunity to have their work published and read. There were no cash prizes, only personal satisfaction. As a symbolic gesture, however, Gianna will be presented with an object that holds great value for those who appreciate design and light, the AJ Table Lamp, still produced today by Louis Poulsen to an original design by Arne Jacobsen. The central character in the story by Basar Erdener, awarded second prize, is a nearsighted 28-year-old who can’t remember where he has laid his glasses. He can scarcely see and is running late for a business meeting. At a certain point of the story, it happens that his eyes begin to speak and defy him, accusing him, in a paradoxical conversation, of unfairly blaming them for his lack of sight whilst the blame lies elsewhere. “It is your mind that sees, not us. It is your mind”. A difficult concept for him to absorb until he finally bids farewell to the meeting, and perhaps also to his career, and begins to look around him and discovers a number of things. “This is the story of how I started to see”, concludes the author. Perhaps a better choice of words would have been “to look”, because this is the crux of the entire story, the enormous difference between seeing things and really looking at them, understanding their intimate nature. The path that Basar takes us down to make his point is the icing on the cake, and he uses an original and playful medium to convey a very serious message. A little girl, a young man and – making a somewhat odd trio – an elderly man. Una luce sola, by Giorgio Cattano, talks about a presumably older man who remains alone in the city one summer. “You would only get bored at the sea,” his son reminds him. The older man is not that upset, though he is only sorry not to be with his granddaughter whom he seldom sees. He will be the only resident in the large building where he lives – all the others have left for their holidays. By day, when the sun begins to filter through the blinds, and the wall beside the bed “is alight with fragments of sun”, he is at peace with himself. “A hundred, a thousand sparks of flame dance on the plaster; they are a window onto exotic, faraway lands that I explore every day. It is the magic television of my dreams.” But by night, darkness brings terror, “time stands still and no dream seems to make it pass faster.” Sad? Not really, because, for those who know where to look – this is the positive moral that we believe we see in the subsequent developments of the story – life always offers solace.
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