Chapter I The Snail and the Ostrich

2023, colored drawings paper, 50×35 cm, technic, pen gel ink ballpoint

The Snail and the Ostrich is a fairy tale: it tells the story of a snail who lives in an abandoned factory in the desert and his encounter with an ostrich, trapped on a spiral staircase in the same factory. The ostrich will soon discover, at his expense, that it is the snail who has trapped him, to climb onto his body and use it as a lookout point, from where he can admire the stars. Such a particular fairy tale was born in an equally specific context: The Snail and the Ostrich is in fact the first chapter of Short Fairy Tales for Adults, a series of fairy tale narratives that were conceived based on individual conversations between Driant Zeneli and the psychoanalysts of the Jonas Psychoanalytic Clinic Center of Trento. Playing on the reversal of roles between patient and analyst, the artist constructed a “session” with each analyst aimed at creating, from time to time, a different fairy tale with two animals as protagonists, according to the classic line of La Fontaine.

If the narration is free, some characteristics, chosen by the artist, remain constant: for this reason, each of the stories involves some type of metamorphosis, with the addition of elements that recall the cyborg and technological world, and deliberately excludes any moral intent. The drawings that make up the corpus of The Snail and the Ostrich follow the path of the story developed with the Lacanian psychoanalyst and philosopher Leeanne Minter. The other fairy tales, also in development, will be created with different techniques, from virtual reality to the use of kinetic papier-mâché sculptures. The journey will end with a book that will collect all the stories.

The Short Fairy Tales for Adults project was born as part of the Waiting Room Residency Trento 2022, a research residency focused on the relationship between art and psychoanalysis