Francesca Todde, A Sensitive Education

A Sensitive Education

Francesca Todde

Publisher
Départ Pour l'Image
Year
2020
ISBN
978-88-944622-2-7
Specifications
Hardcover
155 x 215 mm
112 pages
4-colour offset with UV inks
Texts by Luca Reffo and Francesca Todde
Translation by Anna Eva De Chiara
English
First edition of 300 numbered copies
Winner of the Premio Amilcare G. Ponchielli for the best Italian photobook 2020/21
Special mention at the Premio Marco Bastianelli for the best Italian photobook of 2020

With A Sensitive Education the photographer Francesca Todde explores, through the figure of bird educator Tristan Plot, the possibilities of empathy between different natural species. The narrative, far from being a naturalist documentation, is rather focused on the emotional sphere and the sensibility of birds and humans. The photographic research develops in resonance with the delicacy of this wordless dialogue. Tristan is a bird educator specialised in soft methods. He prepares birds for participation in theatre and dance performances or film documentaries. He also works on the new concept of ornitotherapy and mediation through the animal, creating contact between birds and people with disabilities, the elderly and prisoners, in order to promote new sensations and create a deep reconciliation between birds and humans. When he was a child, in the forest behind his parents' house in the Touraine, Tristan noticed that, if he remained still for a long time, the animals came out of the vegetation and it was possible to observe them. Even today, this practice of slow approach, respecting the rhythm of nature, remains essential to his educational method. Having studied ecology, biology and ethology at university, he developed an educational technique at the intersection of imprinting, traditional training and positive training. His method is a set of observation and predisposition of mind in harmony with the environment, according to the sensibility of the other and in relation to expression and behaviour codes which are different from the human ones. Tristan, through the intuition of animality as something delicate, subtle and minimal, defines the relationship with birds as an exclusive bond able to reconcile the rhythm of the species with the individual one. His research is based on the understanding of the sensibility of birds and aims to recover that ability, lost over the course of evolution, of perceiving the minimal variations and micro-movements that are the expressive world of animals.

More by Francesca Todde

More from Départ Pour l'Image

Spine Index, an archive of independent photobooks

FIND A
BOOK
/
/

ARCHIVE

Loading…

ABOUT

SpineIndex is a digital platform dedicated to independent photobooks, photography publications, design books, and self-published editions — the kind of work that rarely makes it into bookshop windows or mainstream catalogues. It exists to document, connect, and keep visible a world of publishers, artists, and makers who operate outside conventional distribution. A living reference for anyone who takes this territory seriously — collectors, researchers, students, and the simply curious.

#

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

R

S

T

V

W

X

Y

Z