STORTA PAURA is the first book produced by S.O.F.A. APS – GIUNGLA, a collection of poems and drawings selected from Josse Renda’s personal archive, curated by Irene Panzani, with contributions from Luca Gerry Conte, whose story resonates between the bucolic Giungla and Josse’s current works, and Pau Masclans Pazos, whose reflections accompany the book in the form of a bookmark and a puzzle. The publication was born from the desire to reorganize and enhance a vast body of material scattered across notebooks, diaries, and journals, offering a comprehensive view of the author’s poetic and artistic production in recent years.
The book combines original texts and drawings, preserving the spontaneity and gestural quality of Josse’s work, which transforms every gesture and every element of the surrounding world into poetry. His writing moves between dream and reality, memory and imagination. As Irene Panzani observes:
“Almost without our noticing, the poet left the vast and noisy stage of the world,” writes Milan Kundera in the preface to Life Is Elsewhere. The title, borrowed from Rimbaud, was an idea of the publisher, but Josse would have preferred to call it The Lyrical Age, attributing this period to youth. Youth goes hand in hand with poetry, with lyricism.
And in Storta Paura, as in his overall artistic practice, Josse Renda continuously reactivates his role as a creator of worlds, stories, colors, and gestures. It is precisely the gestural quality—his hands, his body—that seem one with the materials he touches, whether ink, clay, fabric, tempera, earth, or metal. Like an alchemist, he approaches the world and its elements; like a poet, he sensitively describes their inner and outer movements, enumerates, subtracts, evokes, and questions himself, reflecting on the human condition in this vast and noisy world he inhabits.
And perhaps there is hope in poetry, in this lyrical voice that calls the world into being.
The author describes the process of collecting and transcribing his materials as follows:
“Then in a dream, the vision for this collection of words, to put a full stop—
I dreamed of going through everything I had written: the grid notebooks,
the yellow sheets, those folded into six parts, small notebooks, diaries, work sheets,
writings embedded among the drawings. I transcribed them, cut little or nothing,
set aside a bit of shame. Decay, in the end, has its own grace, like the occasional incoherence; this is what, in the end, seems to tell me, and do not pretend otherwise. These words born there, and in the months returned here in gestures, pauses, paintings, I had forgotten, as sometimes I forget words inside me, or silence them. They were written on sheets, on the body, but also in the hands, in the paintings, in the shards of terracotta and clay, and even in the wardrobe, in drawers, some of them like diaries.”
How to get the book
The book is available by writing to sofa.lucca@gmail.com. It can be acquired through a voluntary donation to S.O.F.A. APS, which supports the publication of independent cultural works.
Donations can be made safely via PayPal:
Donation for Storta Paura