The value of diversity

A new edition of the Oscar Pomilio Forum is coming. As every year it welcomes and throws down a very specific challenge: to talk about ethics in a free and original way, through lateral and unexpected views. But for this reason, it is more prolific than any abstract reflection on the issue.

This is how we developed the main theme of this edition, which will ask the speakers and special guests to reflect on the precious value of diversity, or better on the deep ethical mechanisms which ensure "the sharing of differences" inside the human community: from the most archaic tribe to the hyper-modern societies.

The idea is to analyze together the ability communication has to give back meaning and significance to human ​​"universal" values, how it is able to overcome and at the same time to protect existing diversities between cultures, even those far apart from each other, both in time and in space. Hence, the choice of the two main speakers, the photographer Jimmy Nelson and the documentary filmmaker Andre Singer: two "observers of cultures" of great sensitivity and moral rigor, united by a genuine anthropological interest for the beauty and richness of our past.

The ability of anthropology to tell stories of a “different kind” through images and voices of the protagonists and without adding any interpretative filter except its own "participant" gaze, becomes a means to track down the basic rules of (co)existence  and the essential role that, in its broadest sense, otherwise as a set of languages, practices and customs, communication plays in this process of going back to origins. Convinced that look at our past, through the traces that survive in the present, is the best way to understand and build the future together.

Franco Pomilio

Pomilio Blumm’s  President