Lelio Bonaccorso, an internationally renowned cartoonist and illustrator from Messina, has been involved for some years in an original cultural operation: establishing a mythology of reminiscence through the art of comics.
In “Wind of Freedom” he told the story of Dina and Clarenza, together with Nadia Terranova signed a graphic novel on the years of Caravaggio in Messina and now opens a “Window on the history” (this is the title of the work inaugurated yesterday at the Bisazza High School) of the city on the shore of the Strait. And it does so with a large illustrated panel (12×4.20 m) that entirely covers a wall of the Aula Magna. A sort of long mural in which a simultaneous story of the historical eras in which Messina was “glorious” takes place.
A meta-window, because inside the work one looks out onto another window, a three-light window that opens onto the legendary female figures of Dina and Clarenzlinked to the historic siege of Messina by Charles of Anjou during the Sicilian Vespers; in the centre on the landscape of the crescent-shaped area, a citation of that of Antonello da Messina at the base of the Crucifixion of Sibiu; and on illustrious personalities passing through Messina over the centuries, such as Dumas, Cervantes or Don Giovanni d’Austria.
Then there is Antonello himself as spied on at the moment in which he painted the “Annunciata” of Palermo with its live model or the Palazzata, a scenographic and colossal backdrop offered to the visitor who came from the sea and today to us contemporaries orphaned by such grandeur. In a city where even the historical memory has remained buried for a large part together with men, works of art and goods under the rubble of the devastating earthquake of 1908, Lelio is recovering and reconnecting pieces through a medium capable of reaching young people directly, before the written or spoken word can. And in this operation he met the sensitivity of a school principal, Joanna Messinain comparison with which this new cultural project has grown. If there is an art of oblivion that from Themistocles to Umberto Eco helps to forget what we painfully do not want to remember, few things help to exorcise the complexity of oblivion like art. “Ninth art”, as the French critic Claude Baylie defined it, the comic strip in Bonaccorso’s declination is able to make citizens aware, in this case students, soliciting their critical sense and commitment to society. And how does it do it? It does it by translating a problem (the forgotten identity) into images, which often arrive before the words of denunciation; ending up by rediscovering the historical coordinates of what is still visible today.