Storie di navi, di case, di cose ... L'opera di Roberto Innocenti e la capacità di vedere/narrare oltre l'umano

This article analyses the work of the Italian author and illustrator Roberto Innocenti in an ecocritical and ecomaterialist perspective. All the books for children created by Innocenti over a forty-year long career (1980s-2020s) are characterized by a passionate attention for things, objects, settings, materials, brought to the forefront and depicted in an iperrealistic way, while human beings are represented as small and distant entities, i.e.: as part of the varied tissue of forms, presences and stories of which the world is made. This propensity to attribute importance and meaning to the non-human world, and especially to “things”, which become protagonists of what we read and see in his illustrated books, is precisely the attitude that should characterize the future of our culture in general, according to the thinkers of Ecocriticism and New Materialism. After centuries of anthropocentrism, an epistemic shift is necessary to create a new balance between man and environment, mind and matter, subject and object, and this shift can already be found in Innocenti’s books, whose narrative/visual strategies succeed in representing reality as a multilayered dimension full of vibrant matter (Bennet, 2010), inextricably human and non-human.