My daughter was teached since ever to appreciate and endorse freedom and respect, but her question revealed that she hasn't digested those concepts and their reciprocal relations yet. I also realized that it's not easy to give an eleven years old child definitions that really go beyond the standard words one can find in a dictionary. One thing is the appropriateness of language, a completely different thing is the inner meaning of words.

I tried first a common explanation (sort of):

• Tolerance and integration are mainly related to religion, traditions and sexual behavior: pervasive concerns in people's life.


• If you don't mind that your neighbor prays a different god, eats food you don't know, or wear clothes you wouldn't wear, you're tolerant.


• The opposite of tolerance is intolerance, that is when you can't stand that your neighbor behaves differently from you and you are tempted to force them. This ineluctably leads to violence.


• Intolerance turns fast into hate and racism: you think that you are better than your neighbor and that any means is good to prevail over them.


• On the other side, tolerance can turn into indifference: still better than intolerance, since you don't fight, but not very good indeed, because you'll never live as one.


• Appreciating differences and trying to exchange experiences and traditions, beside respecting people's freedom, is the fundamental of integration.


• Integration is when you finally live as one and differences turn into common culture.

That's OK, she said, but what is the real advantage of integration over tolerance?



Well, think about a mosaic. It is made of tiles. If you look at it from a distance, you see a beautiful image, but if you get closer you can distinguish each single tile and the empty spaces between each of them and its neighbors. Use a magnifying lens, and you will be able to see only the empty spaces. Those tiles work well together in composing the image, but each single tile stays alone anyway: it takes nothing from its neighbors and gives nothing to them.

Now, think about a painting. Even if you get very very close, you cannot really catch the exact point where two brush strokes meet, even if their color is different, because they mix together and create new colors that did not exist before in the palette. There are no empty spaces: each color takes nuances from the other color and gives its own tones to it. This is how two colors can "live" as one, creating something new at the same time.

Yes, she said, integration is better than tolerance, it is more!



Yes, it is much more: it is the way to the future. We all have a million year history behind our backs and should have learned already that an instinctive fear of what is unknown simply does not help. It doesn't help to grow up, it doesn't help to improve oneself or to make any progress. Trusting those who allege we have an enemy to fight just does not make sense: it is an old strategy, used and abused by politicians, and not only politicians, to gain trust and power. The enemy can be a nation, an immigrant, the devil, terrorism, anyone or anything: fear will do the rest.

Now, mosaics and paintings are forms of art. But art not only can help us to understand concepts: it also can teach how powerful contamination is - and contamination is even more than acceptance: it is the most complete form of integration, where barriers have fallen and differences become the most interesting thing to investigate and experiment. A true experimentation field, in opposition to the actual battlefield where intolerance will reap its harvest, that is victims, sooner or later.

This is true, imho, not just in visual arts. I am thinking, for example, about music. Jazz would not be jazz without contamination. In its veins, the blood of the whole world flows and pulsates as a unique, powerful energy and neverending source of inspiration. I think, within a constellation of great musicians, about Joe Zawinul (r.i.p.), whose band's ever changing line-up always included musicians coming from at least five or six different countries all around the world. Listen to his recordings, and you'll feel what it means, beyond any matter of personal taste. And, outside of jazz, I think about Peter Gabriel, who almost thirty years ago understood that mixing pop sound with tribal rhythms was a way to create something new and unexplored, precursing what is now universally known as world music. By the way, he used to sing "Fear, she's the mother of violence", explaining in one verse what I could not express as clearly in my long speech above... So, why sould we fall into the mistake of "Getting hard to believe in anything at all but Fear"?

And I think about myself. Not a painter, not a musician, not an artist at all: just a mean wannabe-photographer. Here on DA I've met wonderful artists, wonderful people from anywhere in the world. I am constantly learning so much from each of them, and I am trying to make their community spirit mine and to give it back to the community. I am aware that integration and acceptance in the virtual world can be easier than in actual life, but we all have to try in both of them, since this is definitely the way.

This is the only way we have to give this world, the real one, a future.

Please enjoy with me some beautiful deviations that appear to be related, conceptually or just visually, to the concept I tried to express in this article.