SPEAKERS 2024

Born in Calcutta in 1956, Gita Wolf was educated in different cities in India, including New Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore. She received her master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Erlangen/Nuremberg, Germany. In 1987, after living and working in Germany for 10 years, she moved back with her family to Chennai, India. In 1994, she started Tara Books, an independent publishing house. Interested in both the word and the visual, Gita has always been keen to explore their relationship in creative and unorthodox ways. While she started out with the idea of creating picture books for children, set in the Indian context, the publishing house has gone on to do more: create illustrated books for children and adults, push the boundaries of the book form, publish titles in art pedagogy, and explore the relationship between the lived life and art and craft making. Experimenting with the production process is something that Gita has been interested in, from the beginning, and this has meant that making the book is seen not as a mechanical exercise, but as one that adds to the book’s content.

Over the past thirty years, she has been joined by writers, designers and other creative professionals who share her vision and have extended and deepened it. Tara Books is committed to bringing a variety of marginalised voices and perspectives to the reader, while continually playing with the form of the book. 
As a feminist, Gita believes in non-hierarchical models of functioning, based on dialogue and cooperation. Publishing decisions have evolved collectively with editorial, the design team and production and finance departments actively involved in deciding on the publishing list for the year.

Apart from being the chief publisher, Gita is also the author of several books. Beginning with The Very Hungry Lion in 1995, she has written over thirty books for children and adults. Several have won major international awards and been translated into multiple languages. One of her books—Do!—was honoured with the prestigious BolognaRagazzi New Horizons award in 2010.

Gita also travels extensively on behalf of Tara Books, giving talks and workshops in India and abroad. She was invited to be part of the jury for the Bologna Illustrators Exhibition and Catalogue 2013. Gita continues to explore publishing options. From the time she made the decision to feature Indian indigenous art in children’s books, to now, when she looks to work with different aspects of Indian artisanal traditions, including textile printing, she has worked at developing new ideas and directions. Invariably this has involved a measure of creative risk-taking, unforced and forced errors. In all this she has remained reflexive and open to learning. 

As a young boy he has studied a diploma in Illustration in Gaza before he left Gaza to study in Rome, Italy 20 years ago. Now based in Dubai, he is well known as a contemporary artist mixing installation drawing and collage, layered down with geometric precision, he stitches visual artefacts together and forms fresh constructions that invite unheard discourses and a historical rethinking.

He has done many handmade art books such as Illustration, he likes the idea of mixing his art with illustration and maintains an unwavering dialogue with his symbolically charged homeland. Knowing that his place of origin can never be just a 'land', the artist unleashes an ever-evolving repertoire of artistic techniques to negotiate a space which has been carved up and re-drawn many times. Steering away from nostalgia and the fetishisation of displacement, he draws from academia, architecture, as well as European art traditions, to negotiate an axis of complex social and cultural relations; built and natural environments, longing and belonging.

Irantzu Piquero is an editor, author and illustrator. She has published the book India in the Mirror. Goddesses, gods and demons, the yoga fanzine for women yoga4aliens and Ordu txikitan, an illustrated album with the novelist Fer Izquierdo about the night. He has just published a small, illustrated book-object entitled HAMAIKA, in which he portrays 11 birds that inhabit our skies, to accompany the travelling exhibition of the same name that he has coordinated in the context of the defence of rural territory against the threat of macro-renewables. She has been transmitting the philosophy of yoga for years and exploring the Indian imagination from its most popular, graphic and poetic angle: mythology. After an intense period in Copenhagen, she has spent half her life in Barcelona, where she worked in different publishing houses and started her career in the world of yoga. Now you can find her in the mountains, on the border, rebuilding an old borda with Matthias and Lupo, between the forest and a wild sky. She connects with the rest of the planet through her underwater mikro-publishing company Ediciones Anfibias, and doing what she loves most: teaching yoga, drawing and storytelling. And when she has a little time, she reads cards.

Jakub Plachý was born in Prague in 1989. After studying at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, he devoted himself to illustration and graphic design. He divides his time between creation and Xao bookstore-gallery and small publishing house on Krymská Street in Prague. Since 2016 we organize exhibitions dedicated to the field of illustration, graphic design and book culture in general.

We organize art workshops for children, readings and book presentations. Our book showcase focuses on illustrated books and comics, including more experimental projects in sometimes very small print runs. We present books and prints by Czech and foreign illustrators and comic artists, from established artists to students or interesting amateurs.

José Rosero is a Colombian visual artist. His works have been published in different magazines, newspapers and publishing houses. He has also held exhibitions in different spaces in Colombia and abroad, and has received recognition in Colombia, Italy, Mexico, Japan, Korea and the U.S. He has given workshops and lectures based on his own research in eight countries, as well as being director of the Casatinta space in Bogota, Colombia, a house dedicated to illustration and visual arts.

For Rosero, art is like a compendium of languages, where each language can be learned and brought to interact with others. That is why he has been developing his work in painting, drawing, illustration, teaching and cultural management, with approaches to sculpture, photography and performing arts. For Rosero, the artist must be a polyglot, since a question always has more than one answer, and by exploring the arts one can find the most varied ways to respond.

Karishma is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, illustrator and fashion designer. Having lived amidst different cultures and languages, her constant transformations lead her not to shedding old skins (like the snake), but rather to add on layers of knowledge and experience (like the turtle). Conceptually she works with the essence of the human experience through storytelling, with popular culture, folklore, world mythologies and ecofeminism. She is moved by the idea of “thinking with our hands” and she is convinced that through making, one can access a different kind of intuitive, creative knowledge. For this reason, in parallel to designing clothes, illustrating books and interactive art installations, in 2014 she founded L’École de Papier, a school and laboratory where she researches ways of accompanying artists (both children and adult) to enter the “state of play” which is so easily accessible through artistic practices.

EN. I was born in Barcelona in 1979. Ghost was still several years away, but when I was a child, I wanted to be a sculptor and artist. It seems that Demi Moore copied my idea, but I didn´t care because the smell of wood that I felt every day in the family business made me change my mind. I don`t know if so, much varnish affected me, but I started studying Industrial Design Technical Engineering and Industrial Design at the Elisava school and all this while working in my family`s furniture factory. It was the beginning of a constant in my life: a lot of design and a lot of dreaming.

After finishing my studies, I started my professional career in different studios in Barcelona and Milan: GTP Architects and Engineers, Design between 4 Walls, Torres Decoration, Studio Marco Piva and Conte Oggioni Partners. It took me some time to realize that the time had come to get involved in a project that had a more personal flavor. In addition, I take care of the design of the magazine FILOSOFÍA & CO, that creates a portal of thought and philosophy and publish a printed magazine where they illustrate and share interviews, ideas, and contributions of the great thinkers of all times.

The thing that intrigues me the most right now is making my own books (and comics) - that includes writing and illustrating. I used to be also self-publisher, but I am trying to escape that practice in order to have more time for the creative parts. I am working with risography a lot. In between projects I paint big aquarelles or do draw abstract pastels. Also, I explore technique called airbrush. Tattooing came to me on demand of my friends, who wanted to wear some of my drawings on their bodies. Sometime during the pandemic, I just bought a second-hand tattoo machine and the ride has begun.