What Holy Protector do we need today?
"I always say the Jurassic Park tyrannosaurus, it seems to me the most suitable at the moment".
After the triumph at Più libri più liberi, the small and medium-sized publishing fair in Rome, Zerocalcare talks about the Patron Saints to whom an important part of the large solo exhibition 'Dopo il botto' is dedicated, conceived by Silvia Barbagallo, produced by Arthemisia, which it opens on December 17 at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan where Kurt Cobain could not miss "which for me is the representation of the nineties" says the cartoonist.
"There had already been a major exhibition at Maxxi in 2018, but this one is bigger because there are other materials found over time and partly because I've produced a lot of stuff since 2018".
Does 'after the bang' refer to the post-pandemic?
"It is a kind of hypothetical meteorite that seems to me to have partly hit our lives and relationships which certainly, I don't know if it was the pandemic, has produced an acceleration in the disintegration of relationships between people. Not therefore in its health dimension, but precisely in its impact between relationships. Partly due to isolation and being closed we lost contact and confrontation with each other and even when the pandemic ended, we maintained this way of relating to other things with each other" underlines Zerocalcare who, as always, saw the longest queues at the fair at the stand of its publisher BaoPublishing for its famous firmcopies.
Over 500 original plates, videos, sketches, illustrations and a site specific work.
"The exhibition has an architecture in which when you enter you go onto a street where there are ruined buildings, hypothetically post-Apocalypse, post-meteorite and there are a series of survivors who live on the roofs instead. They are a bit like people trying to resist.
Everyone has fires that light up which for me represent lights that are examples of resistance to this present.
And inside the exhibition there are works made for these resistances" he says. And then there is a part that is very intimate, personal, things related to my experience. The books, TV series, something very individual and then there are many things that are not unpublished but have circulated in circuits that are not those of the general public. In the other section there are concert posters, record covers, things related to social causes. It is the most collective part, I am the one who designed them but they photograph a piece of the country: everything concerning the resistance of the Kurds, the disputes of the logistics workers of Piacenza, the workers of the Gkm of Florence".
Also coming to Netflix is the second animated series after Tear Along the Edges.
"It will be called 'This world won't make me bad.' it's me and always Valerio Mastandrea who will play the Armadillo. The title is very much centered on the story."
And does current events reflect this?
"It is a moment of great disintegration in general and of great effort to recompose a minimum of solidarity between people".
Now a tour for the latest book 'No Sleep Till Shengal' (Bao Publishing) is also waiting for him.
"It's a book I cared about a lot. They were sent to northern Iraq because the threat of an attack by Turkey was increasingly imminent and now it seems to me that this thing has quite precipitated. Turkey in recent weeks has struck in very heavily throughout northern Syria, is making the north an unlivable place risking erasing all the experience of democracy that the Kurds have built up in the last ten years" says Zerocalcare and runs away from the boys waiting for him at the stand of his publisher.
"You can see that there was Netflix. There are very young kids, who are even 8 years old and have also read the books".