My little world

"My" world was born many years ago, perhaps sooner than I can remember. With the start of elementary school (as it was called in my days) it materialized before my eyes and was a refuge for me, always. When I felt out of place, when I was afraid, when I just needed to explore my fantasy places. It all started in a class like any other. When many years later, for a Set Design assignment, I was asked to make a small model of my class, as I remembered it, I placed my seat in the center of the classroom, isolated from everyone.

Altered memories

"Were you really isolated from other classmates?"

Certainly not, I got confirmation from my mom, once I showed her the model. Not that it mattered, I felt that way anyway: different, distant, alone. It never bothered me too much to feel alone, quite the contrary. If anything, I was always deeply uncomfortable when I had to relate to others. I blushed, I stammered, I was also ashamed of my shadow. And I always sought refuge in the only place where I could be as strong and courageous as Joan of Arc: my fantasy.

The very first step

First we had to do a quick pencil drawing with a quick chiaroscuro to establish the various elements and the proportions they had to have. From this we had to start to create the model. Faithful reproduction was not required, the important thing was to insert everything we remembered or thought we remembered. I had in mind the green small desks with the black stripe, the wooden chairs with metal legs, the walls painted in a (horrible) glossy hospital-green paint, the blackboard with a wooden frame, the inevitable felt eraser and those that by heart were the hangers for our coats, in glossy black plastic, with a crescent shape. Who knows if it all was really like that? Who knows if it was all completely different?

My (likely) elementary school class

On either side of the chair there were seats reserved for the "idle kids". I could remember wrongly, but it seems to me that one was more or less always reserved for Bruno, who in fact was a big pain in the ass for me. The other instead for one of the three Andrew there were in the class. Among other things, he is now a great artist, a great man, a great dad. He certainly did not deserve the place of the "naughty", yet not even that unpleasant "label" slowed down his sprint in life, far from it! I, on the other hand, remained the one who always prefers to stay a little in the shade, the one who never sees herself as good enough, but the one who needs to tell her (magical) stories.

"Did you enjoy working on a physical model?"

Very very much! Creating miniatures turned out to be for me not only extremely pleasant and relaxing but also akin to my being. Small but magical worlds. If there was a job where I had to recreate small things all day long and invent a way to make an object look like something else, I would throw myself into it!

"Were you accurate, in your opinion, in reproducing objects according to your memories or perceptions?"

Since more than twenty years had passed since first grade (or fifth grade, for that matters!) I'm not sure I have faithfully reproduced the desks, even though I remember them exactly like that in my head. Some things I deliberately did badly, such as the paint on the walls, the paint on the radiators (thinking about it now, I should have made them more yellowish), the window frames ... Also this was my very first model. In any case, I really enjoyed doing it.

The real gem of this delivery was that of having to draw a quick sketch of our teacher (always according to memories) and make a larger model of it with colored plasticine. My clay teacher on exam day flew off the shelf and pinched her nose (looked a bit like Muppets' Piggy). Initially I wanted to fix her (among other things the plasticine had also melted a bit due to the great heat) but since she had always scared me a bit, I decided that that on her nose could easily be the "virtual punch" that I would have wanted to give her from time to time ;-). Forgive me, maestra Pierina, now you are surely in a better place and of course I have forgiven you for your ways and your screams. Will you do it too for this little trick? :-)). With love, your Alessandra.