January:
Sub comandante Marcos of the Zapatist Liberation Army, Chiapas (Mexico)
The sweet zapatist revolution began in a January some years ago, a revolution invented by a man by practicing children-s words. Marcos put into poetry a forgotten people, that has become his people, almost without using weapons, leaving wide spaces right to words, hiding his face not for hiding, but to remain one of many. The Quixote and Che Guevara stress sweetness and poetry.
February:
Iqbal Masih, Pakistani child killed at 12 years. Symbol of the fight to children exploitation.
Iqbal was a 12 years child, a face little known, a history left aside. Iqbal was killed and will remain perpetual symbol of the little slaves to whom an unjust globalisation steals every day their childhood and life not only in his Pakistan but also in other lands, poor and rich.
March:
Emad Omram, student of the Academy of Fine Arts, Baghdad
Emad Omram, student of Fine Arts, Baghdad. Before the second Iraqi war, Un ponte per Baghdad showed images of people in their everyday life. Perhaps to go back and find them when all has finished. Nothing has finished. The devastation that arrived upon Mead land has broken bodies and past pieces. He has a nice boy face, the one of all boys in war from every boundaries side.
April:
Father Alex Zanotelli, combonian missionary for 12 years in the Korogocho shanty town (Kenya)
Alex Zanotelli is Africa crying searching between our garbage/waste, especially moral ones to survive one day more. Alex has known misery and pain very intimately and when he speaks put them close to us and we train never not to forget our privileges: I have made an adult and furious god out of him. Of this, he will be angry because he speaks of himself of a little and poor man.
May:
Rachel Corey, American student killed in Palestine, Rafah
Rachel Corey was only a girl, a young american pacifist with a prophetic name. Her fragile body cut like flowers and olive trees has cried to her two people, the ones of blood an the compassion ones, Americans and Palestinians, the horror of the supreme justice, without hate, only with the pain that is one of the highest witnessing of the young against the war.
June:
Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the Tibetan people in exile.
The Dalai Lama. Tibet is far and near Palestine. His own people is disappearing as main ethnic presence, they are not destroyed and has thrown seeds in the world. Tibet has not finished in the stand still of an ancient culture and incomprehensible to a fierce modernization. Perhaps his people, losing, has won.
July:
Gaia and her children, Genova, July 2001, Earth in movement
Gaia is our Earth and her children are women and men of peace migrating; religious and people of the movements.
From the peasants without land to tribes without water. Gaia is in the white hands of the peace in the declaration of no surrender to the gloomy destinies of a exhausted planet. Gaia is Genova and Carlo Giuliani, boy.
August:
Aboriginal natives
Between the many news that never will make news there are lives and deaths of the Australian aboriginal people. Their world is put into a tourist postcard: Ayers Rock their Uluru. Since the time of the dream we do not know anything of the stolen land, always too little, because it is normal for the civilisers to steal the land. They appear to us far, small and few.
September:
Vandana Shiva, physicist and Indian economist, expert of social ecology
Vandana Shiva is the voice of India, Mahatma-s legacy: the return to small economies that caress Earth and do not rape her. Only this may give a good future to whom has unluckily put on the trace of the crazy Western development. Vandana Shiva is an intelligent and strong woman. It would be good if her wisdom infect the Earth.
October:
Mahamad Dijar, master artisan of the Bazaar, Taskurghan, Afghanistan
Mahamad Dijar was a master artisan of the Bazaar in Tashorglan that image so sweet with the rose and his eye that looks far, icon of the travellers he got all: rustle of caravans, soft steps, accomplice smiles in the bazaar, before the Russians, before the Talebans, before the Americans, when Afghanistan was a suspended world lined up. Mahamed Diar was still very old. Perhaps he is dead before all this.
November:
Indian nation
Indian nation is those that could have been existed. She has the face of a little girl that in a sacred clock embrace the names of the ancient tribes, the parks, the scared animals, she leaves behind the genocides, but she do not forget her important history. She wants to be future.
December:
Fra David Maria Turoldo of the Servi di Maria
Father Turoldo closes and opens a new time of the spirit by remembering how it is always necessary to stop and look inside other than around to continue then to fight outside because outside in each case you must come back.
Calendar, world map, map of faces. Faces with a name (or many names?). They have the name of a new land, that, together, deeply have dreamt of and still are dreaming. Land that Luisa Rota Sperti - the calendar is a sign - it is not tired to dream. And to evoke: for us.
To skim the map and being in many places: today we are called to resist to the wave of those they want us men and women of a unique place. The one where to live happy alone.
Skim and visit. Still before the shot of faces, to visit in dream a place unknown to many of us, the birthplace, and still before the gestation, of these faces. The gestation, I was wondering, perhaps between the white walls of a house or in the nature without walls, so vividly participant, the place that only Luisa knows, a place of the soul because the pencil draws the thoughts and the emotion of the soul. Places of the soul that today more than ever should be loved and honoured. From us that, it has been written, we do not have the time to make a soul for ourselves. Map of the world as occasion to get a soul.
Skim the calendar and suffer the seduction next sheet, so great is the infection of the "consume and throw". And resist to the seduction of look and pass by. Looking and passing beyond the image, like the priest and the Levite of the parable. They looked and passed beyond, beyond the man wounded on their road. Let's resist for a month on that face. May it speaks to you. And may have the gift for you to take care of it.
Skim and stop. To stop at faces and to stop at history. The history of the little ones of the Earth, bag snatched of the title of "great" that is only theirs. Histories of the little children of the Earth and histories of the defenders of the little, of the dreams defenders. In listening of gestures and word told by the faces.
Faces to look, honour, caress. To be caressed for the light, the bravery, the force, the freedom, the colour of life, the life and the gospel, that have communicate to us. The colour is inside. Drawn without colour, because everyone that skims the map of the world may have eyes for the colour inside.
Faces that look near and look far. Near if near it means to read reality, sometimes the one most ignored, hidden by purpose, with no audience in the crowded media circus of masks. Empty masks. Without soul.
Faces that look away in a myopia season, in the churches and in the society. Rare is the gift to see with the eyes a future that should not be an extinguished and interested programming, and rare is the gift of prophecy that awakens our sleepy eyes, God's dream. Awaken us for humankind well. Faces of vigilantes and prophets, that cry the silence. From their own being little. They cry the trespassing at the men and women of the border.
Faces of singles and faces of people. Faces of alive and of living in a promised land. Faces that the art and passion of Luisa Rota Sperti evoke for us monthly, companions of their, hers and ours: for a humankind that still merits to be hoped for. (Don Angelo Casati)
