ALBERT ROBIDA

Visions of the future at the dawn of what is today considered as technological age bring to mind Jules Verne, author of popular adventure novels such as A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days. Less well known – but even more remarkable – is an artist incredibly talented and visionary, lived in the second half of the nineteenth century: Albert Robida.

Fanciful French writer, brilliant caricaturist, and weird illustrator, Robida was known within his contemporaries for his Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul,(solipsistic adventurer of the seas grown up in a monkeys colony) and the trilogy of futuristic novels Le Vingtième Siècle, La Guerre au vingtième siècle, La vie électrique. In them we can find pioneristic intuitions about the practices of modern warfare, like robotic missiles and poison gas, but also intuitions related to technological changes through the use of telephonescope, smart instrument for continuus viewing of moving pictures and terrific precursor of modern LCD television screens.

Inspirator of Méliès’ movies and inspired by Grandville’s opera – from which he gets the zoomorphic blend – Robida carries us in a dimension always balanced between imaginative power and realism.

Robida’s universe is the sky, where we can find suspended stilt houses spinning in space, flying ships that fill crowded horizons and fabulous cities without roads any roads where strong sci-fi elements multiply themselves coexisting.

A peculiar characteristic in his works is the attention given to the practical application of inventions proposed and their social consequences. Embodying the ideal of a prophet of the pseudo-science Robida makes us dream about the future, which has already gone.

text by Luna Todaro