ChiassoLetteraria

ChiassoLetteraria - 18th edition
International Literature Festival

The eighteenth edition of ChiassoLetteraria - entitled "Pensieri selvaggi" (Wild Thoughts) - takes place on 1-5 May 2024 (with previews on 1 and 2 May and opening on 3 May) and is dedicated to non-conformist thinking and the relationship between human, nature and animality.

At a time when thinking is in crisis, we need to think differently, outside the box and outside the commonplace. One of the possible ways of rebirth passes through a new connection of the subject with its deepest, unconscious, wild and free part. Often shunned and feared, when not the object of excommunication, the confrontation between human beings and their animal part has accompanied the evolution of thought in all its forms.

We think of the totemism of the earliest peoples, the sacredness of certain animals or plants, mythological figures such as the Minotaur, the Sphinx and the sirens, but also of Aesop's fables, Kafka's tales, the novels of Melville, London, Woolf, Bulgakov, Stoker, Orwell, Shelley and Jackson, right up to science fiction literature, the weird and even comics - the various Batman and Spiderman - as models of wonderful contamination.

In recent years, the relationship and hybridisation between humans and other living beings (as well as between the human and the technological) is at the centre of many reflections.

Some of these concern the overcoming of anthropocentrism, animal experimentation, intensive breeding, plant intelligence, environmental protection and the ethical implications of the post-human. In the apparent oxymoron that gives the festival its title, for which we were inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss's 'savage thought', the opposition between human, animal and plant is eliminated, and the idea that all - man, beast and tree - belong to a single community: that of living beings, comes to the fore.

This awareness is the only one that can lead us towards the preservation of biodiversity and thus of life, and has ethical, political, social, cultural and economic implications that are as unprecedented as they are necessary.