5/19/2023 0 Comments Cicada by shaun tanElsewhere I’d seen a documentary about the life cycle of cicadas, in which they spend up to 17 years underground before emerging all at once, overwhelming their predators, then mating and dying in a brief glorious period. A particularly lonesome pot plant, an employer’s cat or dog brought in to work, a lost sparrow or, of course, a bug pitifully trying to escape through a glass window.Ī second source of inspiration came from hearing cicadas outside my bedroom window, and sometimes finding their empty casings – the cast-off skin of the nymph – still clinging to a high wooden fence (there are large lime-green cicadas in Melbourne that I’d rarely seen in Perth, where I previously lived). It was a thought I recalled subsequently whenever I saw something organically out-of-place in the sterile environment of corporate office spaces. I remember joking to a friend that maybe a big insect, a bee or something, worked in that cubicle. In one window, and one window only, someone had placed a bright red flowering plant to catch the sun. The earliest idea for Cicada came during a visit to Berlin around 2005, although it could have been any city at any time: I was looking at the imposing grey façade of an office building, studded with hundreds of grey windows. or is it? You never can tell what a bug is thinking. It's a very simple 32-page picture book about the unspoken horrors of corporate white-collar enslavement. Cicada is the story of an insect working in an office, and all the people who don't love him.
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