"370 New World" by  Marcantonio Lunardi

370 New World is a work on the new solitude created by the economic and social crisis which crossed the whole Europe in the last ten years. The human isolation which is displayed to the spectator is, by now, part of the everyday life of many people. The author thus introduces his creative work as a kind of mirror in which the spectator may recognise some details of his or her own life. Despite the video focuses on the new media, Lunardi does not want to make any accusation. The work, in fact, is placed beyond the commonplace debate which stigmatizes technology and the social networks. The author simply tries to put in evidence the different solitudes which surround the various characters who live in his work.

The first solitude is imposed by an external circumstance, that is the economic crisis. The glances of the artisans, of the artists, of the workers are lost on a distant horizon, and lost into the research of a job which is, by now, disappeared. The crisis deprived them of their essence and they have freezed into a state of paralysis which transformed them into the living waste of an evolving society. New World focuses on the changes which are happening now, and which are happening too fastly to prevent people to break down.

The other solitude represented in this creative work is the one generated when the new means of communication replaced the human relationships. The mechanism itself, and not the social networks, is negatively judged, because it gives people a powerful excuse for mutual indifference. They actually are important tools, but they are often used compulsively so that the individual finally lives emotionally detached from everyday life. By indulging into the screen’s light, we are released from the real problems of life and of living together.

The work closes on a man who stubbornly seeds the asphalt. That peasant, with that peculiar gesture, strongly asserts his will to get back a certain concreteness, in the name of his link with the mother earth. Twisted, dried up, deprived of meaning, the earth is always there to prove our original essence of social and natural animals. The act of seeding becomes thus a fight against the asphalt which covers the square dominated by the monolith of an abandoned mill, which becomes the symbol of the industrial and economic decay. We do not know wether the peasant will win that unequal fight. But we do know that his battle is the only ethic choice possible.