Vanessa Case is a collective novel as the result of a Writing Workshop in Craft World. This is not the first collective writing experience promoted by Lorenza Colicigno aka Azzurra Collas in the virtual world, already in 2007 in Second Life the collective novel La Torre di Asian (The Tower of Asian) was started, which was born as a narrative of the community experiences related to the Tower created by Asian Levden alia Fabio Fornasari in Postutopia, then migrated to other sims to land as an architectural “artifact” in Opensim Craft World, MdM.
The Writing Workshop in PostUtopia, Second Life, where the collective novel The Tower of Asian was conceived and written
In both cases, a group of inhabitants/avatars wrote a series of chapters linked to a first guiding chapter, written by Lorenza Colicigno, transferring experiences, even disconnected at the level of fabula, into the narrative to build a plot with multiple reflections, including yellow, black, and pink, among investigations, dystopian visions and utopian visions, but above all connected to a flow of thoughts, emotions, expectations, and projects made virtual not only by “place” but also by an imagination free to move in different and opposite directions, by sensibilities made extreme precisely by the idea of a freedom free from the confines of the real world, and yet so charged with all the experiential and value bearing of life lived in the real world.
Craft World, like Second Life, offered the ideal “place” to find the point of connection between these two poles, an imaginative freedom felt psychologically as absolute and an inevitable reconnection to the concreteness of real life, made unavoidable after all by the theme of the new collective novel, the attempted suicide at school of the teenage Vanessa, but also by the seven female writers’ awareness of the uniqueness of the person, not hidden, but enhanced, by their avatar.
Today of The Tower of Asian, as indeed intended by the novel itself, fragments persist on the web, as, for example, in more than one blog, in magazines such as Abitare https://www.abitare.it/it/archivio/2010/05/12/la-torre-di-asian/ and in Parla Come Navighi, Antologia Della Webletteratura Italiana, by Mario Gerosa, Edizioni Il Foglio 2009, in a Concept Book “The Tower of Asian-In viaggio,” in a video by Elisa Laraia aka Helissa Halasy in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0L9Vz9R1zA&t=16s and in other videos by Fabio Fornasari, including https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rxp9WVAZDmU&t=13s.
The collective novel The Vanessa Case has also embarked on its journey in the complex of “virtual places” that we now collectively call the metaverse: from Craft World, from the sim + Donna Zero Violence, in whose Listening Center for Women in Difficulty began its virtual “life” as part of the Women Writing Women Workshop, to the site https://ilcasovanessa.eu/, to which the seven women writers are entrusting their pages in a reconstruction in turn entrusted to the care of Ana Bor and her epigones, the janitors of IAB, the Interstellar Library.
The Women Write Women orkshop, in which the writing of the collective novel The Vanessa Case
was conceived and began.
The women writers who participated in the writing of the novel, together with Lorenza Colicigno. are (in alphabetical order):
Elisa Laraia
Eva Kraai aka Francesca M. R. Bertolami
Fiona Saiman aka Lucia Baldini
Laura Antichi
Luciana Mattei
Rosa Massaro
Rosanna Galvani
In https://ilcasovanessa. eu/ The Vanessa Case is flanked by The Tower of Asian, here the two novels are further intertwined, not only because they are the result of the same theoretical and practical approach of two Writing Workshops curated by Lorenza Colicigno aka Azzurra Collas, nor because they were both “produced” in virtual ways, but because they express a precise idea of writing, as the promotion of a communication aimed at the future, writing, in fact, is essentially the promise of an uninterrupted dialogue between “human beings” in the different forms they have given themselves over time: without this trust, and without the memory that is its instrument, writing would be mere rhetorical exercise, not a messenger of civilization, which it can and should be.
The Vanessa Case and The Asian Tower in the IAB
It can be read at https://ilcasovanessa.eu/: The IAB, the global library, was at the center of her [Ana Bor’s] work, words at the center of her interests, every single letter, with its graphic and phonic thickness, at the center of her life, fixed in her body.
In Lorenza Colicigno’s imagination, the tower and the body of Ana Bor merge into a single papyrus that is generated from the multiverse cosmos and envelops it in an indissoluble web. Writing, the narrative of times beyond times, of places beyond places, are the matter of which that papyrus is substantiated. The task of Ana Bor and her epigones is to reconstruct the narratives that flow fragmented in the multiverse cosmos, relics of an unbroken narrative that nevertheless discounts the infinite breadth of the times and spaces of that multiverse. Different languages, their multiple codes and their different phonic-graphic manifestations become untied threads of narrative knots that must be reconstructed in order to restore to an interpretive unity the stories written in lost alphabets, seemingly, or only perhaps initially, incomprehensible.
Vanessa’s story is one such narrative. It takes place in Melata in the 2000s of the Solar Age, its traces transmitted from Age to Age through the IAB, the interstellar library, the focus of the work of Ana Bor and her epigyns. Their task is to restore to understanding the alphabet in which they are written and together the value as a document of a time and space and its values.
The sense of this narrative approach is to entrust to narrative, writing and its various codes a wealth of knowledge and values, concentrated in a story. This, taking place in a defined place and time, while entrusting to future memory, wherever it will lead, that knowledge and those values.
Each word is a message launched toward the future, and this awareness, which is also a civil and moral commitment, must substantiate the writing.
Happy reading!
