When I received the invitation to join this years Eskisehir Cartoon Festival about “World Heritage” with my works and words as a speaker, my first thoughts went to ancient buildings and monuments from the past. Thinking of what to design and what to say for the festival I decided to start with the beginning. The story of Adam and Eve and the apple, symbol of knowledge and good and evil, thrown out of paradise, is wellknown in many cultures as the origine of our presence in this world. I soon found out that our heritage is much bigger than only buildings and monuments. In fact it’s all that what we’ve created and went through during centuries of developement. All that we’ve left behind in symbols. From buildings and monuments to paintings, poetry, fashion, dance and theater, rituals and ways of life. From periods of peace to periods of war and revolution. Human character is that of a creator and inventor in order to survive in the first place and to please himself in the second. Or is it the other way around? His curiousity towards the unknown drove him outside paradise, but also brought him to the moon. And he’s on his way to Venus and Mars and beyond now. It created solutions for practical life and learned him to organise it and keep control over it. The world is cruel and life is hard, but people are obviously capable to survive and leave their marks behind.
In our modern time, a very complicated one as everything and everybody is connected, the apple of Adam and Eve, symbol of knowledge and good and evil, turned into an Apple Ipad. Basically available for everybody and basically free to consume. You can find all you want to know of what lies behind and could be the future, all wisdom of the world can be found. What’s going on in the world of today can be followed right on the spot. An overload of information and impressions. This festival will write history also as it shows in a humoristic way the cartoonists point of view on the theme of our heritage. And now it can and will be saved in the theater of the mind archives of the Big Brother. And I hope with a twinkling in the eye and a good laugh at what once happenend in Eskisehir in 2016.
Willem RASING
Cartoonist