Delivered. How to approach the war and its wounds, the hope to preserve and maintain without sentimentality, by observing the scars to draw life lessons? This challenge, as soon as the aggression of Russia on Ukraine with a view to annexing Crimea, a couple of Ukrainian artists took it up. Both were born in 1984. Trained at the State College of Decorative and Applied Arts in Lviv, Romana Romanyshyn and Andriy Lesiv founded the Agrafka studio in 2010, specializing in design, painting and graphic design, and are committed in publishing and children’s books. But the freshness of Maïa who loves numbers (2014), a poetic variation to guide the scientific curiosity of children, was brutally eclipsed by the dread that gripped Ukraine that same year, when Vladimir Putin attacked the country.
Composed in 2015 in Lviv, in the emotion of the drama, translated into French the same year, then into English six years later, The War that Changed Rondo finds a tragic relevance today. An imaginary city, Rondo has the magic of happy fables, a dazzling greenhouse where flowers and rare plants sing and delight peaceful inhabitants. This harmony, Danko, Fabian and Zirka are very attached to it. One sparkles like a light bulb and hums incessantly, the other has exceptional flair and sight, the last, an origami bird, is covered with notes and sketches that tell the story of the world. But the Eden lasts thirteen pages and the light goes out when the tanks knock on the gates of the city.
Low noise resistance
Amazement, panic, also a start of the three friends, who defy misfortune by apostrophizing war. It hurts them, of course, but they persist, resist quietly and, gears and cogwheels, coordinate the mechanisms that shape a collective machine capable of dissolving the monster. And if the poppies bloom again, they sign with a bloody livery the beautiful but so painful outcome. As soon as it was released, the album was celebrated, distinguished by a mention at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in 2015, in the New Horizons category.
Life resumed, as in Rondo. And a few years later, two of Romana and Andriy’s albums won the supreme prize, non-fiction side, immediately translated into French – In my ears I hear the world (2017, Rue du Monde) and In my eyes I see everything (2018, Rue du Monde) –, since the lessons of Danko, Fabian and Zirka are once again worth the peace returned. But the beast is not dead and it is more than ever necessary to return to the martyrdom of Rondo to speak as accurately as possible to the children.
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