A Little Art School in Torpignattara

 

The students of the “Rong – Art & Craft School”. Torpignattara, Rome.

“There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun”
(Pablo Picasso)

By now in the photographic exits or during the Workshops in Torpignattara, the visit to the “Rong – Art & Craft School”, in Via Benedetto Bordoni 50, is a fixed destination.

It is a school that recently opened on July 30 of this year, following the arrival in Rome of the teacher M. Shafik, a well-known artist from Bangladesh. The director is Dipu Avi Saha, a very dear friend of mine, almost like a younger brother.

Now they have about fifteen children, who every Saturday morning, for a few hours, spend their time drawing by hand, modeling objects and figurines with paper, and copying objects from real to color them with pencils or wax paints.

The thing that pleases me most is that, every time, the photographers who enter this school are enthusiastic about it. You go up the stairs towards the exit, always with a natural smile on your face, like after an hour of a relaxing massage between candles and incense.

Moments of school

With Director Dipu and the photographers of my last Workshop on Torpignattara. November 2022

We are certainly not talking about the Academy of Fine Arts, but precisely in its being a little school that its charm is amplified.

Because seeing young Bangladeshi children – the youngest is 5 years old up to the oldest of 14 – get their hands dirty with pencils and paints on large albums, in 2022, the digital age, is a joy that illuminates the depths of the heart.

Then it is known, for those who follow me on this blog, how much I am tied to drawing.

It was the first art form I used to let out roses and thorns, smiles and demons.

I can say with absolute certainty that I am a “visual” type, and even when I write I use words to see and show. Obviously, photography is only the last form that this fluid process that is my life has taken on.

 

Some of my drawings of adolescence

A piece of news I recently read made me think.

A prototype of man has been created digitally as he will be in 100 years, in 3000. It was a research commissioned by Toll Free Forwarding: researchers from an American company 'created' this being which they then called Mindy, a woman whose physical characteristics will be heavily influenced by the excessive use of electronic equipment such as smartphones, tablets, and PCs: that is, hunched over, small head with a wide neck to support the head facing forward to observe the screens, the bones of the thicker skull to protect from radiation of used devices and the stiffened right hand in the shape of a claw for continuous use of the smartphone.

Nothing comforting.

The idea that our body is deformed by compulsive addiction to electronic devices is very depressing.

Mindy, the hominid of the future.

Even if I remember the poetic words of Yusof Gajah, one of the most famous Malaysian illustrators, famous for his elephants, who unfortunately passed away in March of this year. I met him several years ago at the Children's Book Fair in Bologna and then I went to his home studio in Kuala Lumpur, in December 2017. Talking about the future of illustration, I asked him if he thought that, in the not-too-distant future, books for children would all be on a digital platform, as well as drawing and painting. He replied that, in his opinion, children will always prefer printed books, contact with the page and bright colors.

You really have to make an effort to believe in this dream but part of me wants to think the same way.

With that claw hand, the man of the future will no longer even be able to hold a pencil in his hand.

 

Yusof Gajah. Kuala Lumpur, December 2017

It's a future that causes immense sadness.

I think this is the reason for the unaware smiles that bloom on the faces of those who observe the children of the “Rong” art school, which then means color in the Bangla language.

If the schools of language or of traditional music and dance serve to maintain the identity of a nation, especially for people in the diaspora, a school like this, of design and art, has perhaps an even higher function, that of saving – in all its meanings – creativity and imagination, so that our souls are not icy surfaces of pixels and silicon.

 

I forgot: school enrolments are always open.

 

Thanks for the photos of School to Dipu Avi Saha.

Italian version