This book describes polarization with tremendous effectiveness, with the colors chosen by Patricia van Dalen, the text by Mireya Tabuas and the visual language by Ricardo Báez.
Photo: Ricardo Báez
Tomorrow, in Washington DC, Joe Biden assumes the position of president of the United States in a fragmented society, almost split in two. At the same time, in Athens, it is presented Blue and red, a Venezuelan book that is becoming a classic for children about this binary world that has touched us, always for or against something.
Venezuela, at the end of the twentieth century, may have been the tragic geopolitical scoop of that decline and of a given moment of trauma, this preciousness arose where a childish voice relates what happens in his family when each of his parents insists on seeing the world through a single color.
Its authors are Mireya Tabuas (text) and Ricardo Baez (illustration and design), the artist Patricia Van Dalen dealt with the color and the publisher that originally published it is Camelia Editions, founded in 1999 by María Angélica Barreto and Javier Aizpúrua, who still run it. Camelia’s job, a small house, is well known by lots of Venezuelan children and parents from the last three generations. Many of those in their twenties grew up amazed with Stung dog, they learned the letters with Abcirco, Rubén Darío was read for the first time in Sonatinathey laughed at themselves with Oh Love! and they were all nephews of Aunt Berta.
Blue and red It appeared in Spanish in 2014. That year it won the Best of the Book Bank award and sold out soon after. In the midst of the protests, it was presented at Librería Lugar Común Altamira, and was read in lots of activities in schools and communities in various states, such as the one organized Tracing Spaces in the José Félix Ribas de Petare neighborhood.
Then, in 2015, it was published by Editorial Peirópolis of a convulsed Brazil, after buying its rights to Camelia at the Bologna International Book Fair. In 2019, its author launched it in an authorized edition for the web that circulated through a burning Chile. And last year, Helena Arellano —the illustrator of Sonatina– gods Blue and red Alexandra Mitsotaki, activist and director of World Human Forum, who got Nefeli Publishing to publish it in Greece, in a bilingual edition (English and Greek), of three thousand copies; and that an American publisher wants to have it, in view of the increase in the division of that country in the last four years. A Red and Blue discussion on Democracy, is the name of the presentation event in Athens.
María Angélica Barreto tells that, in 2013, when Tabuas sent her Blue and red, together with his partner, Javier Aizpúrua, he thought of Ricardo Báez “to design a geometric, abstract book that would appeal to a wide audience of all ages.”
The combination makes this book almost poetry. It is an object that reveals the poverty of the one-dimensional, of that flat world into which fanaticism and stupidity push us, and also the affective pressures that could make us dispense with more complex perspectives of reality.
A kind of scream
Its author, Mireya Tabuas, is a Caracas native from Chacao who has ended up in Santiago de Chile. In 1996, Tabuas was awarded the National Journalism Prize, for 15 years she was a professor at UCV and, in Chile, she is a university professor, gives literary workshops and publishes a medium about cryptocurrencies. He has always written literature and has published several books for children and adolescents. Twice it was on the IBBY honor roll (2002 and 2012), the highest recognition in the world for children’s literature.
Tabuas started writing because he couldn’t dance. She has been doing it since she was little. She also took care of children when she was young, and that made her fascinated by the world of children. When her children were born she began to tell them stories that later became stories. But he clarifies that he does not write for children, and not only because he also has books for adults: “It has never been my idea to think of writing intentionally directed at a children’s audience, I think it is something that is in me, that is born spontaneously as an expressive need ”.
Apart from her well-known journalistic career, Mireya Tabuas has a narrative work for many readers
Blue and red It is a kind of album book, with very little text, almost captions, something that was not usual in his work. “Now I understand more the album book as an ‘artifact’ very different from the book where the word prevails. As an editorial object, it is unique in its kind, a conjunction of image, word and concept ”.
Blue and red He writes it in 2013, after the irregular elections that Nicolás Maduro “won”: “I was slumped, I looked around me and found a large and deep gap of isolation, some kind of consensus was impossible. He felt or predicted the destruction that was greatly accentuated from that moment on. The deep cleft permeated work and study sites, communities and families. In my grief, I imagined how a child would feel seeing all this. From there came the text, which I sent an hour after writing it to the Camelia editors, and they responded immediately. In the afternoon, the designer Ricardo Báez and the plastic artist Patricia Van Dalen were part of the project that we all felt. It was a proposal more than literary (although the literary is always much more than the literary). It was a kind of scream ”.
Tabuas was amazed by the graphic solution that Camelia found with Ricardo Baez: “it was a geometric and minimalist illustration. And I realized that this made the text grow a lot, because it left the reader an open door to interpretation and reflection ”.
Tabuas was fascinated to see that the Banco del Libro used it in reading workshops and activities in communities and also the UCV School of Psychology, in workshops on polarization, coexistence, tolerance. In many schools they discussed conflicts with him, but the work that most moved him was the one done by the architect Ana Cristina Vargas from Trazando Espacios. On a staircase in the José Félix Ribas neighborhood, they drew the story (each line on a step) so that everyone who went up there could read it. In the urban intervention, the local people participated and saw the results of working together, beyond the differences.
Tabuas also had to be in Chile during the social outbreak of October 2019: “I was terrified. The violence immediately reminded me of the one I saw so many times in the streets, the one I experienced as a journalist and citizen in Venezuela ”. Then he asked Camelia Ediciones for permission to publish it for free in digital format. “I did it, and several schools and communities worked with him, and some digital media hung him up.” Now Tabuas has high expectations with the Greek edition, promoted by a foundation that promotes democracy.
We cannot do without blue or red, or the ways in which those colors are presented in the book. That world would not be a human world, I comment. Tabuas thinks it is a good point and adds: “a theme that emerges from the book is the right to diversity. There is not one option, there are not two options, although they make us believe and feel that we can only commune with one thing. The child in the book (like many of us) is given two options by his parents: either blue or red. The child assertively manages to make his own choice. But by the actions of blues and reds and by their graphic representation we realize how similar they are, they are practically a mirror. But they don’t see it: they are two blind extremes that touch ”.
Since April 2020, Tabuas has been working on a project that calls Tales without a Crown in which he combines texts and illustrations, illustrations and texts, and which he distributes as reading material for families and schools.
An essential story
A book like Blue and red it is an indissoluble combination of texts, images and design, and for that reason it was also necessary to speak with Ricardo Baez.
Báez is on the way to becoming another of our flagship designers, a descendant of that lineage of modern Venezuela that still amazes and reaps national and international awards. His work focuses on editorial design and, especially, on the close relationship between design and photography. His latest works have focused on the conception, development, editing, design and promotion of photographic projects in the form of a book or photobook. In addition, together with his partner Andrea Gámez, he is the founder of the Typography Báez® studio.
Báez has a long relationship with the master printer Aizpurúa. “The books that I print in Venezuela I do strictly with him,” he stresses. Every time he visited the Ex Libris printing house in Aizpúrua, where Camelia is located, he would sit down to talk with María Angélica and comment on his interest in children’s books. This is how they invited him to design various titles for the publisher and some promotional material. “But until the moment they told me about Blue and redI had never made a children’s book as what they call an author or illustrator. I must note that I consider that the designer has a great role as the author of a book as long as that is clear in front of the author of the content or editor ”.
I insist that its authorship is stronger in the case of Blue and red, but Báez resists: “Yes, it has a stronger sense because I have created content, but I always think that design, in the same way, modifies original content and also creates it in order to better communicate ideas.”
Báez was interested and moved by the idea of illustrating this children’s book, but it also scared him, as it was done at a very tense moment. “I think that María Angélica Barreto, as an editor, was very smart in not looking for an illustrator to do figurative work. I really wanted a vision from the design itself, not from drawing or illustration, as in most of Camelia’s books ”.
Báez always had the feeling that everyone was “in tune” with the idea that images could not be literal: “And that type of project has always interested me. Ideas where representation has to be reinvented or at least recontextualized. The children’s books that catch my attention do that, like those by Tatsumi Komagata, Bruno Munari or Enzo Mari ”.
The decision was brilliant, because illustrating in a realistic way could have resulted in a message that upset stereotypes or prejudices: “If this book were figurative it would reach fewer readers, they would identify, or not, with the figure chosen to represent each side, with the characters’ clothes, with the area in which they live, the decoration of the house or their physical features… All this, I think, would cut off the communication of the idea ”.
And in the text there was already a suggestion in that direction, explains Báez: “I really followed that concept that Tabuas raised. She reduced the idea to two colors and the colors are sensation, a visual element entirely, it doesn’t sound, it doesn’t smell, you can’t touch it. What I did was continue with the idea in very essential elements. The book appeals to the feeling of the idea, rather than the anecdote. Their understanding depends a lot on the text, although I suspect that a person who cannot read (words) can reach the goal of the story ”.
I tell him that abstraction has a great tradition in Venezuela, linked to modernity and democracy, but Báez replies: “It is very obvious that most of my design responses come from a modernist language, a consequence of the design tradition. and art since the middle of the last century. However, I still do not believe that this language is exactly ‘democratic’ as they say, that is another discussion. Beyond following a way of ‘speaking’ visually that corresponds to a tradition, I think that we chose this way of communicating in a children’s book because it is a rather primitive way – speaking from the perceptual point of view – to deal with a topic like this . Although it seems natural for us to see a children’s book like this, with this language, in the tradition of children’s books in Venezuela it is not so common ”.
To Báez it seems “logical that other countries see the ability of a children’s book to teach their societies how to deal with situations that do not happen only in Venezuela and not only in politics.” He does not believe that a book can change the world, “but it does believe that it can allow someone to reflect on respect for the ideas and tastes of others. It is not a utopian treatise, it is about understanding why the other is different ”.
–
