THE REDISCOVERY OF VISUAL AT THE BOLOGNA CHILDREN’S BOOK FAIR: THE SILENT BOOK CONTEST

The Bologna Children’s Book Fair (BCBF) is one of the capital events for the professionals in the field of children’s and young adults’ books and media contents, where a variegated and international audience meets to exchange ideas, projects, and creations. Moreover, during the years, the BCBF has established fruitful collaborations with many countries, Russia among them, where the international programme “The visual world of children’s books” was developed in collaboration with the Russian State Children’s Library of Moscow. As the very name of the programme suggests, both countries, Italy and Russia, have fully recognized the slow but steady rise of the iconic language, which is crucial for the construction of meaning in the newest and most appreciated children’s books. Another proof of the central role of images and visual storytelling was the founding of the Silent Book Contest (2014) for the best wordless visual narrative of the year, which was showing how images can be powerful cognitive attractors. This article will focus in particular on the last edition of the contest (2021), a virtual one due to the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the participants proposed works echoing the dramatic situation the world was (and is) living in. Now more than ever, ‘to look at’ seems to be synonymous with ‘to know’, as well as to ‘re-elaborate’.