the world at home

If the different social platforms have in fact become the new and almost the only way to relate to others, the network, in all its articulated and infinite facets, has become the resistant and flexible web of an unknown social fabric that to satisfy most of their needs, relies on smartphones, computers and tablets. In Italy it is an unprecedented technological shock, a telematic earthquake that has involved every production sector until it reaches in depth the balance of families and individuals, all forced within the home to measure themselves with the unstable perimeter of their ego very often unprepared to a daily confrontation at close range.

It is a completely unknown way of becoming aware of one's being a social individual called to the high responsibility of relating first of all to oneself, a clear break with the habits consolidated by the well-being and opulence of our civilization, a rude awakening from a full dream of nightmares that you are slowly forced to focus on to realize you are the dramatic photograph of the reality that surrounds you. The status of refugees at home that the pandemic has established and brought into being has taken everyone by surprise, it has left no time and space to allow us a soft approach to the new order of things but, overnight, has severed every bridge , every link and every connection with the very dense and complicated world of relationships in which we were used to moving, first and foremost that of work.

The famous 8 hours a day, including lunch break, the 40 weekly that seem too many and stressful, suddenly became a fantastic chimera; what until yesterday many lived as an imposed routine to endure in order to reach the desired goal of the paycheck at the end of the month, today appears as a dream, a happy interlude, an oasis in which to realize and restore our being a community that operates and builds for tomorrow.

Deprived to a large extent of this horizon, unable in fact to create needs in order to be able to satisfy them in different ways, we live suspended in a mechanism that seems to have jammed; the complex machine of well-being had given us the illusion of being a pendulum with a perpetual motus, a silent security in which we all blindly trusted, a sort of privileged immunity that the West first of all dispensed almost to draw an impregnable border with the rest of the world less fortunate, poor and suffering.

Today an invisible aggressor highlights the extreme fragility of our certainties and our golden conquests, punctually demolishes social embankments and protective barriers, attacks us mercilessly in the worst way by forcibly distancing us from each other and transforming the neighbor into a potential enemy from to avoid. Despite the global effort, this strategy, for now, is the only real form of protection that we have managed to put in place and, frankly, it does not seem to me to be an achievement to be proud of.

Michelangelo Dotta
NP may 2020