The right way to represent in words the worlds and personalities converging at Lago each year is through the idea of glocal hybridity

You write the piece, he said. An essay about how the jury in its diversity and make-up mirrors the very soul of the festival, he said. So, let’s do things right here: the right way to represent in words the worlds and personalities converging at Lago each year is through the idea of glocal hybridity, first introduced by feminist geographer Doreen Massey. Imagine your body as the intersection of a potentially infinite number of lines of influence. These tangent lines have different lengths and spatio-temporal durations, but still all intertwine to shape your identity. Identity is devoid of a purely local or even global dimension, however it goes on fluctuating along a process of hybridization between what is near and what is far from you. In one single body—just like in one single festival—the stories and languages of all the entities inhabiting it, converge. Since speaking of bodily entities may sound kind of devilish (by the way, glossolalia—or speaking in “other” languages—is a distinctive sign of demonic possession), let’s then use Barbapapa family as a soft example of

the plasticity of certain boundaries. A respectable gender-fluid French family, whose father is a sort of pear-shaped genius loci born from the greenery of a park—a pink pudding-like guy who has the ability to take on the shape of whatever object or thing he chooses. He naturally surrounds himself with a bunch of other mercurial figures that animate the scene, and no, I’m not hinting at the jury here. Not comparing Claudio Di Biagio, Hannaleena Hauru, Daniel Moshel, Simone Rovellini and Mariateresa Sartori to the characters of a lysergic vintage cartoon (maybe just a little bit?) but their being part of one single organism, and their endowing it with a wealth of languages and outlooks surely makes them a sort of protean and, once again, slightly devilish beings. The insightful Greeks created a monster with one body and multiple heads to symbolize the chaotic element of water, and placed it precisely in a lake for a reason. Poor Hydra, that didn’t end well, did it? And, good luck to the jury.

These tangent lines have different lengths and spatio-temporal durations, but still all intertwine to shape your identity. Identity is devoid of a purely local or even global dimension, however it goes on fluctuating along a process of hybridization between what is near and what is far from you.