Luigi Iovane

Luigi Iovane, President, Atalante ETS - Artistic Director, Imaginaria - animated film festival

Drawing Europe Together

For over twenty years, in a small town in Puglia, in the south of Italy, we have been building a place where images move before words do. Imaginaria, the international festival of auteur animation cinema we founded in Conversano in 2003, has never been about spectacle for its own sake: it has been about gathering, every August, artists, families, children and citizens around moving pictures capable of asking the same questions the eldest and the youngest in the room can equally understand.

 We later carried this idea to Naples, with Catch The Moon, a festival built entirely for and with children - because we believe the future of any political community, Europe included, starts with the images we offer a child before they can even read. Animation, more than almost any other art form, needs no translation: a drawing that moves speaks to a child in Conversano and one in Kraków in the same breath.

If Europe is a shared imagination as much as it is a shared market or a shared law, then animation cinema is one of its native languages.

Alongside the festivals, we run Imaginaria Experience, a year-round training and image-education programme that reaches schools and several municipalities across the province of Bari, because this conversation about Europe cannot live only in a festival week: it has to enter classrooms, all year round, in towns that rarely make it onto any cultural map.

More recently, with Palazzo Pinto - Comunità Creativa, a former palace we reopened in Sammichele di Bari, we have tried to prove that this kind of cultural work does not need a capital city to matter. Small towns, artist residencies, community rooms: these too are places where Europe is made, quietly, one encounter at a time.

"About Europe" asks the cultural world to open its stages to conversations between arts and politics. We would simply add: don't forget the smallest stages, and the youngest audiences. A continent that wants to be built together should start by teaching its children to look at moving images and recognise, in them, someone else's face as their own.