Apurahat ja residenssipaikat

Taide

Island-Ferry

Island-Ferry is a fiction book for children where the theme of biodiversity will be discovered by content of text and visualized by form of text. The book has 4 main focuses: 1. Nature as a part of ordinary human life. The diversity is not only about rare and disappearing species. The diversity is also about what we have around us in our ordinary city-life. So I plan to write a book based my observations and notes of flora and fauna in Lauttasaari where I have been living for the last three years and I have been inspiring of biodiversity of this place. 2. Influence by feelings, not facts. Generally books for children say about diversity for educational purposes. It's important but usually it doesn't concern a daily life. My book will be a collection of fiction short stories about the coexistence of a human and the nature in an urban environment, that gives new discoveries and joy every day. 3. The appearance of text. Usually words in books are only content. But I want to let my stories to influence by their appearance too! For each spread of the book I plan one story. But this story will be presented on the one spread twice: on one page there will be the text of full value, and on the other page will be the same text but with a flaw. The flaw is a disappear of some element of fauna and flora in the content of text and as a consequence a flaw in the form of text. (Like absence of punctuation marks or disappearance of spaces, or emptiness in place of words, etc.) So, the so-called full text will be rich, harmonious, complex – as a symbol of biodiversity. But the so-called "text with a flaw" will be a visual symbol of a decrease in diversity. 4. Responsibility. I give my reader a choice. The metaphor of island-ferry unites all stories in my book. Two texts in each spread are two coasts. A coast of world with diversity and a coast of world "with a flaw". And the reader will be as a ferry that can dock on one of two coasts. Just need to decide: to which coast?

Thanks to the grant I have a ready written series of short stories called «Остров-паром» (in Russian it means Island-Ferry). This is a fiction book for children, where the theme of biodiversity opens through the content and also the form of the text. The content of the series is the child’s daily life where different types of animals and birds are constantly present (in the process of work I stopped only at the fauna, because it allowed me to connect the stories in one long story). The form of the text is the repetition of each story twice: the first time every story looks as usual, but in the second version the name of one animal or bird is removed from the story and it affects the way the story looks. I wrote the book on behalf of the girl named Anna, so that the reader would imagine himself in Anna's shoes and live her feelings about the nature in an urban environment. In Anna's words I as the author don’t say directly that the decrease of biodiversity is bad and everybody in the world has to save the planet. It’s important for me when the reader can make his own conclusions. I try to make a reader sense how rich and interesting human life can be when it is surrounded by a variety of other life. And at the same time I want my reader to see what happens to world of text when the name of one animal or bird disappears. And a reader has to discover it himself like in a game.

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