Giulia Cristofoli
Letter From the Editor
Dear reader,
Does it suffices to say “once upon the time” for you to guess what will come next? You might get the name of the character wrong, or a plot twist element, but you will know for sure that what follows those famous four words is a story full of adventures, magic, wonders… and fantasy.
We are first introduced to fantasy at a very early age. Some get to know it through their parents reading them stories at bed time. Some get acquainted with it through some weird talking car or a talking purple dinosaur cartoon. Others, yet, encounter fantasy in their childhood games, when they pretend to be heroes, princess, kings and queens in a castle of a distant land. That children’s worlds are full of fantasy, there is no doubt. Those worlds are an inherent part of our growing up. They are shape shifters that follow the needs of our age, a tool for scape, a coping mechanism, an imagination enhancer, a problem solver: fantasy worlds are everything.
Fantasy, by its power to move us so deeply, to dramatize, even melo-dramatize, morality, can be one of the most effective means of establishing a capacity for adult values.
There can be no talking about fantasy without talking about art. Fantasy and art are not synonyms, mind you, although, often, they are a codependent pair. Their common denominator? Imagination. Using their imagination and instigating ours, artists create entire worlds, sometimes made of fantastic creatures and others of idyllic landscapes. We then choose to immerse ourselves in those universes. And we conceptualize them as we imagine them to be, making the fantasy our own.
The power of fantasy is such that, without it, we wouldn’t have the world we live in today. Something out of reality gives us the opportunity to imagine the most extraordinary things, to get out of our regular patterns and to create new ideas. The real power of fantasy is in the way that it opens our eyes to the impossible, only to make us realize that…
... it might be, in fact, possible.
