Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

The Bologna Children’s Book Fair (BCBF) is one of the capital events for the professionals in the field of children’s and young adults’ books and media contents, where a variegated and international audience meets to exchange ideas, projects, and creations. Moreover, during the years, the BCBF has established fruitful collaborations with many countries, Russia among them, where the international programme “The visual world of children’s books” was developed in collaboration with the Russian State Children’s Library of Moscow. As the very name of the programme suggests, both countries, Italy and Russia, have fully recognized the slow but steady rise of the iconic language, which is crucial for the construction of meaning in the newest and most appreciated children’s books. Another proof of the central role of images and visual storytelling was the founding of the Silent Book Contest (2014) for the best wordless visual narrative of the year, which was showing how images can be powerful cognitive attractors. This article will focus in particular on the last edition of the contest (2021), a virtual one due to the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the participants proposed works echoing the dramatic situation the world was (and is) living in. Now more than ever, ‘to look at’ seems to be synonymous with ‘to know’, as well as to ‘re-elaborate’.

Only afew decades ago, with computer technologies on the rise and the belief that only the so-called “hard sciences”would shape the livesof future generations, few would have imagined that stories and narratives would have not only maintained their central role in human societies, but would evenreinforceit. Narration has been recently recognized as a universal feature of humanity, a meta-language capable of giving order to thereality and making usescape from the boundaries of space and time, representing at the same time both a need and a wish of every human being. Given its importance, why don’t we take care of our stories the same way we take care of our bodies? This is the goal of modern bibliotherapy, which putsinto practice recent discoveries for the improvement of the homo narrans’ well-being.

The choice of the reading medium is not without consequences. Reading a paper book or a digital one engages the reader’s perceptual and cognitive systems differently, leading to a different comprehension of the text, affecting the way of thinking, of understanding the surrounding world, and acting in it. Given the importance of such a choice, on an individual and social level, especially in the educational field, it is not acceptable anymore to leave it at the mercy of the latest technological trends or of the dominant commercial interests. While fully aware of the great potential offered by the digital revolution, an increasing number of researchers, in a wide variety of fields, such as neurosciences, psychology, pedagogy and educational sciences are ringing many alarm bells to raise awareness about how harmful the complete cancellation of the paper culture would be. History is studded with transformations of ways of living, acting, and thinking, born of each other’s ashes. However, this is not an ineluctable destiny, and our age has the tools to ensure that paper and screen are not two shields raised one against the other, but two wings that allow, together, human knowledge to reach new and unexplored horizons.