I Beg You to Hear Me! is a body of works and a limited edition publication that celebrates the varied and colourful panorama of Soviet Union literature of the 1920s and 1930s.
Sixteen storyboards in the style of a graphic novel, a collection of pocket-size portraits complemented by fictional autobiographies attempt to ‘translate’ the voices of individual writers or those of a literary group, with the authors emerging almost as comic strip heroes.
AN EXTENDED FAMILY ALBUM
This project has evolved over a number of years – words and visuals are a process of accumulation. These faces have been living with us for a long time, like distant relatives.
Of most of them I knew nothing or very little; of others, I had read their works. Gradually, I was fed more information, briefed on episodes of their lives and given outlines of their personalities – as when fl icking through the pages of an extended family album.
I learned their names and, based on the knowledge I picked up along the way – or lacked – I painted over their black and white silhouettes to give them the bolder appearance and louder voice of an instinctive new narrative: the life story we give ourselves within the waves and knots of history, through the absorbing of our experiences, the hurricanes of love and loss, the bliss of friendship and art; all that excites us, all that we endure.
Francesca Ricci
London, September 2014
francesca ricci 
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