Fine (The end) is a book written in the future to realize that it is today that we must change: this is how Marco Tiberi described it when presenting it. It is a catastrophe-book that serves not only to inspire hope but to incite action. This book will also take the form of a graphic novel, with illustrations by Isabella Tiveron, whose first panels you can see here.
The story of Fine, which the authors hope is not the End of the story, begins in November 2018. I wrote the first pages all at once. We were at the start of the “Friday strikes,” Greta was beginning to travel the world and in Italy no one was talking about climate. I immediately thought we needed a capable hand to tackle a challenge beyond my abilities, so I asked Marco Tiberi, a professional screenwriter, for help. It was a pleasure to see him work, and if the book has quality and value, as we hope, it is solely his merit. Together we worked for months, months in which we overlapped, exchanged, alternated, discovering the pleasure of writing with four hands and an intellectual, literary, and cinematic (and yes, also political) exchange that was never trivial, at least for me.Here is Fine: a diary from the future, written on a drifting, damaged ship, like the world it was supposed to traverse. The pages speak of denial and removal and, therefore, of a destiny we are heading towards very quickly. Without ever changing. On the contrary, denying the problem. Downplaying it. In many cases, mocking those who deal with it, branded as prophets of doom. As if those who tell the truth bring bad luck.The protagonist is bad, awful. And she will discover, too late, what it means to be exposed to a change we can no longer control, precisely because we did not control it for too long.Time is running out. And it is not something that only concerns the weather because it is in general that the forecasts are increasingly bleak and full of tensions and conflicts: some we know, others we will soon discover. And it is not a matter of a thermometer, but of inequalities and disproportions: a measure that has been lost. Finding it again is not desirable; it is necessary.
Text by Giuseppe Civati
Reading Fine accompanied me in imagining remote, yet at the same time possible, scenarios. Sara begins to tell her story on a ship suspended in time. These first moments translate for me into a space at the edge of the world. It seems that she arrived there before us, at the Pillars of Hercules. And it is here that we learn to reflect: in her present, there is no turning back, only moving forward. Where? It is a backward journey in which the characters’ emotions, which once had their own place, a defined role, change radically because the world changes. I wondered who the real protagonist of this whole story was: is it Sara? Is it us? Or is it our planet, which continues its motion, its revolution, despite everything? The reality that Giuseppe and Marco evoke with their writing is strong, and for me, it is both a pleasure and a challenge to add a new voice to this work. I try to implement a transformation intervention in the drawing to create a new level of reading: we can scroll through the phrases of Fine with our eyes, as well as the panels of the comic, in a manner similar to a binary system formed by two stars orbiting a common center of gravity.
Text by Isabella Tiveron