April 2018. In the last expulsion operation of Notre-Dame-des-Landes (Loire-Atlantique) ZAD, the mobile military police fired tear gas and deafening grenades. But the Nightingale, on the three bushes that make up its territory, continued to sing.He crossed “When it weighs 20 grams, it is twice that of the Mediterranean and the Sahara Desert”, So he insisted.This scene is taken from The reorganization of the world (Seuil, 2019), Alessandro Pignocchi’s latest cartoon, nicknamed “Anthropologist Designer” by his publishing house.
Attracted by ZAD for intellectual reasons, Alessandro Pinocchio left the field of university research to engage in the study of watercolor comics and discovered a series of new influences and “Other relations with the world” Among them, plants, animals and land interact equally. He is also the author of an extraordinary trilogy, Wild ecology essay (Steinkis), he adopted the animism of the Givaro Indians and showed us the absurdity and sometimes cruelty of Western civilization.
One morning, we met him at the Botanical Garden in Paris, where he, as a child, followed his mother on an ornithological walk with natural science professor Jacques Penot. Under the stern gaze of the statue of Charles Darwin, he told about his passions: birds, painting, his mother, South America, Jivaro, ZAD of Notre Dame de Paris.
Where did you grow up?
I was born in Athens, but then lived in Rome until I was 6 years old. Since my childhood in Rome, I have always remembered my nursery, which is an unorthodox school, where we were alone on a wooded hill with a slightly hippy atmosphere. Arriving in France was tearful. We and my mother settled in Paris at 11electronic District, in the Folie-Méricourt district-not yet the bobo district. This is the end of the grass and woods. I sit in the classroom.
Have you developed a passion for birds since childhood?
In Paris, Jacques Penot, a professor of natural sciences, organized an ornithological walk in the botanical garden on Wednesday and Sunday mornings, mainly retired ladies, and I, a 7-year-old kid, wandered there. My mother tried to recognize this species with binoculars in her hand. I have children’s memory and hearing, so I learn quickly. Soon, this was not enough for me, and I joined the Ornithological Centre of Île-de-France.
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