Larissa Bertonasco says she spent her teens and early womanhood worrying about the size of her buttocks. “When I look at pictures now, I don’t think I should have worried about my body,” says the enviably slender 45-year-old. “But back then I thought my derriere was too big.”
She attempted to deal with the problem by hiding it, “I would wear a cardigan around my waist”, and by trying to shift the pudge. “I tried not to eat too much but I lost weight in other parts,” laughs Bertonasco, one of the founders of the Spring artistic collective and magazine.
Motherhood, however, changed everything — she had her daughter when she was 25. “The wonder of what my body had produced changed my relationship with it,” says the mother-of-two. Her journey to self-acceptance is beautifully chronicled in her story Bum Power , first published in TheElephant in the Room, a German graphic anthology that recently came out with an Indian edition published by
independent, feminist publishing house, Zubaan Books. By the end of the story, it is clear that her body image issues are solved completely, the final panel depicts the author whizzing through the sky superwoman-like, sparks radiating from her bottom. “Maybe there is a life battery in my bum,” she says, wryly.
The book, the German version of which was first launched in 2016 at the Comic Salon Festival in Germany, sprung from a 10-day workshop held in Nrityagram, India. Sixteen illustrators, eight Indian and eight German, have pictorially represented their memories, experiences, opinions and narratives into this candid, book that raises this question: “What does it mean to be a woman?” she says.
The process of negotiating the world as a woman appears to be a recurring theme in much of her work — whether it is the superwoman of Bum Power or the almost Durga-like image of a many-armed woman desperately trying to balance her numerous roles as mother, cook, and professional while trying to look beautiful and stay fit. Then, there is also her role as co-founder of Spring , “We founded the magazine in 2004 because there was no graphic novel platform for women back then,” she says, adding that the magazine published every summer and composed of 12-14 women, “wasn’t so much about feminist issues but a platform for women to show their view of the world”.
Meet the artist
Two rather contrasting cultures linger in the blood of the artist, who was brought up in South Germany. “My father is Italian, my mother German,” says Bertonasco. Her parents split when she was little and she was raised single-handedly by her mother. “She did a great job — running a successful business, bringing up two children and making a nice home,” she says.
Though she saw very little of her father, her Italian roots run deep. Despite the divorce, her mother continued to maintain contact with her mother-in-law, travelling to visit her in Italy every year.
“My sense of Italian culture didn’t come from my father, it came from my grandmother,” says Bertonasco, recounting those trips to Italy with gusto. “We would take the overnight train and when I woke up the next morning, everything was different. The houses were so brightly coloured — red, yellow and green; the laundry would be hanging out in the street.”
It is this warm, ebullient Italian legacy, deeply entwined with the memories of her grandmother and the food she cooked that comes to life in her first hugely popular illustrated cookbook titled La nonna La cucina La vita , now in its 12th edition. “I studied illustration in Hamburg and this became the topic of my thesis,” she says.
Food — its smell, flavour and texture — had always enhanced her emotional ties to Italy so. “I thought it was a good idea to collect recipes and bring them together with little stories and my childhood memories,” says Bertonasco, who spent three months in Italy with her grandmother, doing just that.
Though it was hard to find a publisher, “the people who did cookbooks said it was too artistic, the publishing houses that did illustrations said that they did not publish cookbooks”, she persevered. She finally found one publishing house that would take it. “It was my first published project and it became easier to become a freelance illustrator because of this,” smiles Bertonasco, who has also worked since then on other cookbooks in partnership with the late food journalist and restaurateur, Carlos Bernasconi.
Her tryst with India happened in 2012, soon after the horrific rape and murder of a 23-year-old paramedical student in Delhi. It got the whole world talking about women’s safety in India and the Goethe Institut decided to do a project in response to it.
Bertonasco, along with fellow illustrators, Priya Kuriyan and Ludmilla Bartscht, spearheaded a workshop titled ‘Drawing Attention’ held at Delhi’s Sanskriti Foundation that encouraged 14 young Indian illustrators to explore gender issues artistically. The end product of that session was the book, Drawing the Line , published by Zubaan Books. “It was inspiring, I learnt so much. I hope to continue this association with India and its artists,” she says.
