The Coexistence of Differences
Achille Bonito Oliva
President Scientific Commettee, Naples Biennial

The 12th Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean finds its expositive theater in the city of Naples, and in particular in Castel Sant'Elmo, that becomes then the transnational, multimedia and multicultural Citadel of Creativity.
Seven hundred artists, belonging to different disciplines ranging from Visual Arts to Photography, Video, Architecture, Literature, Poetry, Gastronomy: from art to material culture.
The theme chosen for this edition is "Passion," understood as a complex background of feelings and behaviors.
This subject seems to entirely seize the heterogeneous identity of the Mediterranean and Europe, which tries to widen its boundaries towards the right direction of a coexistence of differences. Such value seems to govern the dynamics of passion, understood as sentimental and planning background of creative and social attitudes, naturally characterized by some constants that allow considering the exhibition as the assertion of a cultural and anthropological identity.
In such a moment, when the emotional side of every passion seems to prevail up to nihilism, this Biennial gives a constructive response, providing a constructive and creative meaning to the word "passion."
As for the Mediterranean, it is interesting to notice that the cultural identity is not connotable in territorial terms and that the main characteristic lies in the interweaving, in the dialogue, in the exchange.
In my opinion, nomadism seems to be the element that connotes every passion, as a geographical, psychological, physical and mental displacement of the individual. Positive or negative passion, anyway displacement that takes the subject out of him and relates it to the external reality and to the social body. In this sense the central theme of the Biennial seems to direct on the crossing of frontiers and on the idea of travel, always tending to a creative and vital landing.
The event moves in this direction, tending to interdisciplinary multimedia approaches: a linguistic crossbreeding where all languages concur in the delineation of forms of expression connected with the present times.
It really seems that the city of Naples represents the natural theater of such an event, but not because it exalts the passion as a mood, as pure emotional mood and color that animates the streets. Today the Parthenopean city seems rather to suggest a way to canalize passion in terms of cultural project open towards the social activity.
Nomadism again becomes then the central part of the theme, since it means opening, dynamism, movement, able to suggest an anti-tribal and merely locally oriented direction. It looks as if the city of Naples wants to adopt Goethe's definition of irony as "passion that frees itself in detachment."
Here is the passion in its joyful or desperate nuances that finds in the different forms of art the necessary detachment to be able to communicate its own intensity.
After all, the Biennial of the Mediterranean necessarily opens itself to the whole Europe, from Finland to Turkey, because it is connected to the fluidity of a sea that has transported not only goods, but also cultural properties. Undoubtedly the main heritage seems to be the coexistence of differences, the respect for the other that passionately heads for diversity, not in order to meet the enemy, but to enrich his own and the others' lives.