RONDO: FROM SAN SIRO WITH LOVE

A decade ago, Orange sang: “But, in the meantime, at Plastic, there is London Loves, Milan is not New York.” And it is true, it is not and it never will be, but globalization, to quote Ulrich Beck, has set out to kill distances in terms of social spaces and the related flows of images, in a dimension that ranges from the cultural to the political, through the economic. We live in a time in which society has become global and in which it is difficult for countries, cultures and social groups to remain isolated from others. Since the disappearance of the container societies, there has been a growing awareness of interconnections even outside one’s own social sphere, of an interdependence between geographically distant cultures. Immanuel Wallerstein, assuming that the concept of the nation-state is invalidated by the fact that the theory of society as a container gives way to transnationally integrated spaces of social action, sees the replacement of individual societies unconnected to one another with a single system-world in which all social entities, from corporations, businesses, governments, to individuals, must find a place. Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman observes how globality is supposed to lift cultural symbols out of isolation, and that although markets for consumer goods and information select what is to be absorbed, the mode of selection remains the prerogative of the community at the local level, which is thereby renewed or transformed to the point of becoming something else. Here, then, Rondo’s artistic narrative is not rooted in an alien context, but in something as autochthonous as neighborhood life, in a San Siro and a Milan that have been influenced by the globalizing processes also described by Arjun Appadurai, according to which glocal cultures are freed from spatial or temporal coordinates and become a mixture of disparate components coming from everywhere and from the global communication system.