Building fantastic worlds is this year’s theme. But what happens when we build fantastic worlds to explain the real one instead? ERCcOMICS does exactly that: it asks comics artists to tell stories about science. From astrophysics to sociology, from biology to artificial intelligence, every bit of our world can be turned into a story.

Read all the comics on erccomics.com

ERCcOMICS uses the language of webcomics to tell stories about the scientific projects financed by the European Research Council. Be aware, though: ERCcOMICS is not about making science accessible to the general public. Its main aim is to combine science and storytelling to create stories that are beautiful to look at and interesting to read. ERCcOMICS authors work at their webcomics together with researchers, and this exhibition highlights precisely the creative process guiding these collaborations. From the original panels, often hand drawn, to their digital version – that visitors can read on the screens disseminated through the exhibition –, every comic is a little research project in itself. Alongside comic artists and researchers, in fact, there are other people working at ERCcOMICS: web designers, communication professionals and web interaction experts are involved in the research process, in order to find the best way to create each story.

with Marie-Christine Agopian, Massimo Colella, Fiammetta Ghedini, Lorenzo Ghetti an ERCcOMICS authors.
After the talk, opening of the exhibition Alla ricerca della tela infinita. Il progetto ERCcCOMICS

in collaboration with ERCcOMICS, ERC European Research Council, Sorbonne Université, La Bande Destinée, Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna
ERCcOMICS draws inspiration from the scientific research projects financed by the European Research Council to create webcomics. But it also provides a research spaces for artists themselves, involving web designers, communication and web interaction experts in order to create comics that use the digital space at its full potential. Cartoonists, project managers, coordinators and other professionals will guide us into the process that gives life to ERCcOMICS’ stories.

with Eleonora Antonioni, Giselinde Kuipers, Francesca Protopapa
moderator Linda Chiaramonte

in collaboration with ERCcOMICS, ERC European Research Council, Sorbonne Université, La Bande Destinée, Bologna Città educativa delle Bambine e dei Bambini, Istituzione Educazione e Scuola Giovanni Sedioli, Centro delle Donne/Biblioteca Italiana delle Donne, Biblioteca Salaborsa Ragazzi, Istituzione Biblioteche di Bologna, U.O. Pari opportunità, Tutela delle differenze, contrasto alla violenza di genere, Comune di Bologna, Festival La violenza illustrata

What is beauty? What are the parameters defining what is considered beautiful and what isn’t? And who gets to set them? For years Giselinde Kuipers, Sociology professor at Amsterdam University, has been studying how beauty canons are formed and how they influence the way we perceive ourselves. ERCcOMICS made a webcomic insipired by her research, written by Massimo Colella and illustrated by Eleonora Antonioni and Francesca Protopapa.

Read Beauty on erccomics.com 

with Massimo Colella, Fiammetta Ghedini, Tuono Pettinato, Francesca Riccioni
moderator Matteo Gaspari

ERCcOMICS is European Union funded project exploring the power of storytelling in comics to innovate the way European science is communicated. It is named after the European Research Council, an organ that has been funding European research projects since 2007, and it is realized together with Sorbonne Université and La Bande Destinée, a communication agency based in Paris.
Sixteen webcomics in four years will introduce the public to research top quality scientific projects funded by the European Research Council. A unique aspect of the project is the relationship it builds between artists and researchers. ERCcOMICS creates a common ground between the world of art and the world of science, apparently distant yet complementary.
Some of the artists who have been taking part to the projects are Giacomo Nanni, Alessandro Tota, Eleonora Antonioni, Francesca Protopapa, Lorenzo Palloni, Clayton Junior, Piero Macola, Alice Milani, Ira Marcks, Emmanuel Espinasse, Thomas Gosselin, Fiammetta Ghedini, Sandrine Martin.
Beside researchers and artists, ERCcOMICS involves professionals coming from many different fields, such as project managers Elena Billi-Rizza, head of European Affairs for Research and Innovation at Sorbonne University, and Marie Christine Agopian; web interaction experts and web designers Lorenzo Ghetti and Carlo Trimarchi; and communication professionals such as Massimo Colella, Patrick Lemerle and Fiammetta Ghedini.

erccomics.com