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The feeling of not belonging: to anywhere, any group or anyone. This awkward power of being able to look at everything from the outside, to stroll as a ghost among people who, credulously, think we are really there, on the same level. I always thought that this was the strongest impulse that lead me to fiction: the fact I feel like a foreigner even inside my own home. The oddness, the distance, sometimes even the absence of any comprehension of others and of this world. "I'm not from here, I don't belong here and this is what I see".
However, I never thought that this feeling would be unique, only mine. What I didn't imagine was that it could be so widespread. The more I read, the more I live, more foreigners are presented to me. People who don't know where they are, neither where they will end up, and who write of what they see while on this path.
It was from there I started to think about this project. Since this feeling of "not belonging" can move our creativity so much, I decided to invite some authors (friends or not, but always admired) to become more foreign than they already are. None of the writers inside this project share a nationality. Each author will pick a city of another author involved in this project and write a fictional journal for one year. The idea of the game is to increase the strangeness we already feel about our environment in order to raise our own creativity. We only have these few rules to follow:
1. The author can't be familiar with the city he/she will write about.
2. The author also can't visit this city while writing about it.
3. The character must have the same nationality of the author. In other words, the creator and the creature share the same nationality.
After an agreement the cities will be distributed by each author this way:
Daniela Abade - Udine/Italy
Florencia Abbate - Hamilton/Canada
Claudia Chibici-Revneanu - Santos/Brazil
Max Mauro - Mexico City/Mexico
David McGuire - Buenos Aires/Argentina
Matt Rubinstein - Graz/Austria
Gonzalo Soltero - Sydney/Australia
The condition of being a foreigner will be taken to the edge. The author will be such a foreigner to the place he is writing about that he won't even know the city he will have to find the city in his own imagination.
Every week the journals will be updated online. The authors will write and publish in their own language, thus the reader will feel like a foreigner too, as he will be able to understand what the author with his nationality is writing about other places, but most likely, he won't be able to understand what is being written about his own country or city by authors of other nationalities.
At the end of the project the idea is to gather all the material and make translations into each language it was written. We will have an English version, a Portuguese version, a Spanish version and so on. All the foreigners will finally speak the same language. And, luckily, will prove that, despite of being foreigners, they can find a home in their own words.
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