Print Club Torino's Summer School hosted an intensive course led by Adolfo Serra and dedicated to illustration and visual storytelling, entitled “Libri senza parole. Un viaggio di ricerca, stimoli e progettazione” (Wordless Books: A journey of exploration, inspiration, and design).
An explorer of blank sheets of paper, Adolfo Serra trained in Advertising and Public Relations, but soon returned to his first passion: drawing. He studied illustration at the Escuela de Arte 10 in Madrid and since then his work has moved between paper, colour and visual storytelling. Alongside his artistic production, he has developed a strong educational focus, which has led him to conduct workshops in international contexts, working on the expressiveness of the sign, the narrative potential of images and creative freedom. It is precisely this attention to the experimental and pedagogical dimension that made his involvement in the Print Club Torino Summer School a natural fit.
Drawing emotions
During the Summer School, participants shared three days of creative exploration with illustrator Adolfo Serra: an emotional and visual journey, where imagination and illustration merged into a silent but meaningful narrative. The first activities encouraged introspection, exploring the deep relationship between sensations and the graphic signs that can translate them, giving space to spontaneous gestures, visual notes and authentic insights. Through individual exercises and moments of collective discussion, it was understood that illustrating does not only mean representing images, but also conveying emotions and personal experiences. The notebook thus became a creative refuge, an intimate and protected space where emotions and thoughts took shape freely, with sincerity and without constraints.
The narrative power of images
It emerged that even without words, images can tell profound and personal stories. The absence of words has never meant a lack of meaning. On the contrary, participants discovered and explored the potential of drawing as an autonomous language, capable of communicating in a direct and profound way. Working on visual sequences, silent stories were created that evoked emotions, suggested reflections and touched the viewer. In this narrative space, ambiguity was not a limitation but a valuable resource: an open space in which each reader could interpret and imagine freely.
