Stories of ships, houses, things… Roberto Innocenti’s work and the ability to see/narrate beyond the human

Abstract

This article analyses the work of the 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’, is crucial, 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 be found in Innocenti’s books, whose narrative/visual strategies succeed in representing reality as a multilayered dimension full of vibrant matter, inextricably human and non-human.