A child should be afraid of the stranger and the different, as the tale of Little Red Riding Hood seems to suggest? Even with the utmost respect for its archetypal historical-literary value, I wonder if nowadays its morality might not bee too narrow to our kid’s psyche. Childhood is of course full of fears, but it is also characterized by a specific predisposition to explore unknown otherness, to interact and hybridize with it. This openness is a major resource of children, whose removal in adulthood leads to social and psychological distress. Therefore, I imagined a Little Red Riding Hood who interprets the encounter with the wolf in different terms: as an opportunity for knowledge, as an exercise in assimilating the different, as an empathic experiment, as a cure against the predictability of mainstream storytelling. Cappuccetto Rosso was developed for the project “Artist postcards – Helping the psyche to help life” for OPL (Ordine degli Psicologi della Lombardia) curated by Giacinto di Pietrantonio in October 2021.

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