The Big Questions by Pier Dola

This is a story found In Spread Love Comix no. 25 (available here)

Pier Dola is quite the mysterious individual, which is not unlike many other underground artists. Yet, with many books on his resume and the flood of publicly available art he provides the public with (something he has previously highlighted has an important feature of his work ethics), some basic questions can’t escape public interest. Such as, ‘where do you come from?’

‘The Big Questions’ is a ten page story - or ‘journey’, really - attempting to give hints of satisfactory answers. While readers will learn new insight on Dola, other questions will also arise, and, most of all, deep interest in the narrative he’s deploying here.

An autobiographical voyage with Dola, from Chile to Holland, step-by-step. Let's put this important detail right out of the way: this is a very wordy story, which is not what you can usually expect from Dola. Where he’d heavily resort to pictograms, here is a fully articulated story, a rich and insightful look at Dola’s early life path.

The story opens with this first sentence: ‘From were (sic) do I come from?’ The very first word that comes next to it is crucial: ‘Technically’. Indeed, Dola doesn’t outright write that he originates from Chile, but rather that he ‘technically’ comes from Chile. 

While he uses that elusive non-admitting word, later on he will plainly write that he was born there, no quotation marks. Perhaps when he says he ‘technically’ comes from Chile, he means as a human being and not necessarily as Pier Dola, the artist. That one would be born much later.

This is a simple detail, but still very interesting that even in this autobiographical fiction Dola keeps perfect control of the information he discloses about his life. He’s not exactly an unreliable narrator, since Dola has previously described himself as a ‘south-american’  and Chile is situated in the south-american continent. But he’s deliberately not being particularly accurate either. 

As Dola explains what Chile is, he diverts the reader from asking what his birth date is, while also correctly answering the question set forth. His age is another mystery. According to Fantagraphics, he was born in 1965. But in a recent Graphic Vandalism interview, he states being 48 years old, which puts his birth year at 1975 (2023 minus 48), a full 10 years after the Fantagraphics bio indication. 

A decent indication of his age would be a small detail he revealed recently: in his youth, before entering teenagehood, he was highly engrossed with the work of Juan Cabello, notorious Chilean artist and author of Dr Mortis, a comic book from the 70s. So it’s more likely he was born in 1965 rather than 1975. Until we have official confirmation, that’s the best you’re getting and we’re picking 1965 from then on.

As a sidenote, this also means that most of his youth occured under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (reigned from 1973 to 1990), an experience that clearly formed his politically conscious approach and has left him with a very critical opinion of the Chilean economic model.

The next question is: ‘Where Am I Going to?’ Why, the Rotterdam market of course! That’s where he currently resides with his family. Dola supplements the reader with maps of both Chile and Rotterdam. Curiously enough, while the Rotterdam map is decently detailed, simulating an app layout, the Chile map is barren, with only an outline of the country. 

The third question is where the action really gets going, the trash road trip looms ahead. How did an immigrant get rich enough to buy proper food in a 1st world country? Dola knows his public, both yearning for quality storytelling like only he has the secret to, and for some horny stuff. That’s why, before turning the reader’s attention to page two, Dola offers us a porn magazine, 50+ only. 

At 27 years old, presumably in 1992, Dola’s parents forced him out of the house and bought him a plane ticket to Barcelona, to join up with his brother. He explains that this isn’t so much of a predicament, as he would probably have ended up wasting away in manual labor in Chile anyway. In the GV interview, Dola says he first came to Holland 20 years ago, so in 2003, but spent two years in Barcelona before joining Holland (which puts it, presumably, at 1994).

He’ll spend nine months there, until Dola and his brother decide to go to Holland. Dola really glosses over those nine months quite rapidly, but he characterizes this period of their lives as ‘survivalism’. From 3rd world Chile to the windmills of Holland, Dola visually takes us on a worldwide tour. In the US, a reference to 9/11 and the fuel frenzy that ensued; off the coasts of Brazil, a boat sending out Chile’s resources to the 1st world; ‘Tintin’ for Belgium; ‘Godfather’ for Italy; and a few other cultural landmarks.

Like many immigrants from southern countries, they would make the mistake of visiting a northern country in December, when it’s cold and snowing. Plus, they’re super broke, are forced into homelessness and the dangers related to that situation. Digging in trash bins, picking up half-finished cigarettes, sleeping in forbidden spots. They quickly - and unknowingly - progress toward Rotterdam.

Dola writes, as part of the narration, that this story happened five years ago. Probably not ‘literally’ five years ago (in 2018), since he recently revealed having ‘mostly’ left squatterdom in 2013. So the narrator is presumably answering these ‘big’ questions in 1997, five years after the events portrayed.

In Rotterdam, the brothers will be invited to join Via Kunst, a protestant welfare organization. It had an art gallery in the front and an atelier in the back. He sold a lot of paintings there and was able to afford a bed at the local Salvation Army. He compares spending his nights there to a prison system! And Dola presents us a few inmates. There’s the white trash devout christian madman; an alcoholic Croatian sailor; a pimp wannabe; and so on. 

The trip ends here (for now), with Dola noting that his position as an artist gave him some sort of aura.

While Dola provides us with wildly entertaining answers, they leave us with even more questions and deliberations.

I’m sure Dola will spend the next several decades baffling us, not only due to the great, original work he’s putting out there, but also for the renewed mystery that he is.