Pilgrims at Mecca, 1998

The story comes to an end, but this is not the end of the story. The last stretches of the way show the impetuous leading role of the multitude, actor and victim of the times in a symphonic scale, interpreting another revolution of the masses that is at the same time sociological orchestration of Western individualism and choral rejection of that self-absorbed drift. Trapped between the religion of commercial or symbolic consumerism and the ideology of religious or tribal conformity, the crowds of the planet gather in gregarious empathy but do not move in defined directions different from those established by demographic or economic gradients. Except for this divergence, there are more similarities than oppositions between the prosperous narcissistic West and the defensive communitarian East. The statistic behavior of the elementary particles allows to understand that there be no abyss between the cult of the body and the cult of the spirit when both are practiced in endless numbers. If quantity swallows up quality, then Las Vegas and Mecca become comparable destinations, and no insurmountable distances separate the unanimous swarms of religious pilgrimage from the not less organized population that ritually emigrates to the climatic sanctuaries of summer leisure, no matter how much clothing or its absence may seem to point at a nonexistent polarity...[+]