Gina Rosas Moncada

If I Were is a prose poem about nature written by the Spanish writer Pilar López Ávila. Written with short sentences whose endings link to the beginnings of the next ones, it represents the desire of embodying nature, of becoming everything it represents. In a world that insists everyday on harming and destroying nature in a thousand different ways, the desire to embody it represents the need for living beings to live in harmony on this planet. The open

ending suggests the identity of whoever desires to be nature; a person who recognises his/her inability to become what he/she longs to be, but who nevertheless possesses something very valuable: his/her own life. If I Were is a wakeup call to preserve nature, which is inextricably linked to human beings. We are nothing without it and it is nothing without us.

GINA ROSAS MONCADA is a Colombian-born illustrator and printmaker based in Hamburg. She studied Visual arts in Colombia and Illustration in Hamburg. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, for example in Italy, China, Japan, Korea and Germany.

Besides book illustration, she is particularly interested in printmaking and editorial illustration.

She is inspired by the traditional folk music of Colombia and Latin America generally, as well as by the natural environment in her homeland. www.ginarosas.com

JURY REPORT Gina’s response to Pilar López Ávila’s prose poem If I Were results in a timely sequence of illustrations that explore our relationship with nature and how we might consider our futures together. Gina’s work skillfully exploits digital media in an expressive and experimental manner. The richness of the multi-layered images indicate a sophisticated understanding of both traditional and contemporary print methods. The compositions are grand in scale, with the colours and textures forming abstract patterns, leading us into a world of wonder and imagination.

THE COMPETITION IS SUPPORTED BY: Lemniscaat Publishers (nl) The International Centre for the Picture Book in Society (gb) Protea (sa) | Walker Books (gb) The Burg Wissem Bilderbuch Museum Troisdorf (de), S.Fischer Verlage/Sauerländer (de)