Walking down the streets of the area between the Arena and the Monumentale cemetery in Milano is, both a cultural experience and a visual one. This is the area a large Chinese community has chosen to settle many years ago.
The way streets look, with their many shops, is what, probably, strikes at first. A certain kind of shops, whose windows are dressed in a very recognizable fashion. There are, however, other aspects to it all. Sarpi street, the main commercial road of this quarter, is reserved to pedestrians. The Chinese shop keepers, running primarily wholesale businesses, need to move a great quantity of goods via this road, and to do so they employ trolleys and bicycles. These ply the streets of the whole area at all time, tirelessly pushed and ridden by their masters. So many trolleys and bicycles are on the streets that they almost become haunting entities.
Furthermore, these numerous trolleys are blue as blue are the bags with which the bicycles are loaded. Together they hold a chromatic sway on the urban landscape of this district.
The Chinese, undoubtably, have a strong cultural heritage which, it is evident, they do not want to lose. To preserve something means being aware of its peculiarity and differences from what is ‘other’. Ultimately it means to safeguard it by affirming it. In the video Blue Is The Dragon, As if mesmerized by it, the lens records that ‘blue presence’. At the same time, it fancifully elaborates on such a colour co-ordination down Chinatown’s streets and, with its almost oneiric imagery, it offers its conclusion. All this blue here, it seems to imagine, reinforces an identity, just that very identity that is unwilling to become lost. The Blue marks boundaries, boundaries that will be guarded by bastions reminding of the Great Wall.
In the end, Blue Is The Dragon is a visual impression as well as a visual metaphor, which stems from a blend of interest, admiration and curiosity for the Chinese community.
Walking down the streets of the area between the Arena and the Monumentale cemetery in Milano is, both a cultural experience and a visual one. This is the area a large Chinese community has chosen to settle many years ago.
The way streets look, with their many shops, is what, probably, strikes at first. A certain kind of shops, whose windows are dressed in a very recognizable fashion. There are, however, other aspects to it all. Sarpi street, the main commercial road of this quarter, is reserved to pedestrians. The Chinese shop keepers, running primarily wholesale businesses, need to move a great quantity of goods via this road, and to do so they employ trolleys and bicycles. These ply the streets of the whole area at all time, tirelessly pushed and ridden by their masters. So many trolleys and bicycles are on the streets that they almost become haunting entities.
Furthermore, these numerous trolleys are blue as blue are the bags with which the bicycles are loaded. Together they hold a chromatic sway on the urban landscape of this district.
The Chinese, undoubtably, have a strong cultural heritage which, it is evident, they do not want to lose. To preserve something means being aware of its peculiarity and differences from what is ‘other’. Ultimately it means to safeguard it by affirming it. In the video Blue Is The Dragon, As if mesmerized by it, the lens records that ‘blue presence’. At the same time, it fancifully elaborates on such a colour co-ordination down Chinatown’s streets and, with its almost oneiric imagery, it offers its conclusion. All this blue here, it seems to imagine, reinforces an identity, just that very identity that is unwilling to become lost. The Blue marks boundaries, boundaries that will be guarded by bastions reminding of the Great Wall.
In the end, Blue Is The Dragon is a visual impression as well as a visual metaphor, which stems from a blend of interest, admiration and curiosity for the Chinese community.
Walking down the streets of the area between the Arena and the Monumentale cemetery in Milano is, both a cultural experience and a visual one. This is the area a large Chinese community has chosen to settle many years ago.
The way streets look, with their many shops, is what, probably, strikes at first. A certain kind of shops, whose windows are dressed in a very recognizable fashion. There are, however, other aspects to it all. Sarpi street, the main commercial road of this quarter, is reserved to pedestrians. The Chinese shop keepers, running primarily wholesale businesses, need to move a great quantity of goods via this road, and to do so they employ trolleys and bicycles. These ply the streets of the whole area at all time, tirelessly pushed and ridden by their masters. So many trolleys and bicycles are on the streets that they almost become haunting entities.
Furthermore, these numerous trolleys are blue as blue are the bags with which the bicycles are loaded. Together they hold a chromatic sway on the urban landscape of this district.
The Chinese, undoubtably, have a strong cultural heritage which, it is evident, they do not want to lose. To preserve something means being aware of its peculiarity and differences from what is ‘other’. Ultimately it means to safeguard it by affirming it. In the video Blue Is The Dragon, As if mesmerized by it, the lens records that ‘blue presence’. At the same time, it fancifully elaborates on such a colour co-ordination down Chinatown’s streets and, with its almost oneiric imagery, it offers its conclusion. All this blue here, it seems to imagine, reinforces an identity, just that very identity that is unwilling to become lost. The Blue marks boundaries, boundaries that will be guarded by bastions reminding of the Great Wall.
In the end, Blue Is The Dragon is a visual impression as well as a visual metaphor, which stems from a blend of interest, admiration and curiosity for the Chinese community.