The Elephant Man

The acceptance of diversity in our society is still a pending task. There are still corners of society and many personal ethics that hypocritically fill their mouths with goodism and that actually still think that “the differents” are "remnants" of our society.

When I saw David Lynch's film with the same title as my proposal, I was a young Computer Science student at Pisa University. The film revolutionized me in a brutal way and made the concept of “diversity” acquire another dimension in my life. Many years later, Life gave me the greatest gift that I could ever have imagined. It made me the father of a boy with Down Syndrome. Since then, I have fought daily so that his and the diversity of all his colleagues with intellectual disabilities is accepted and respected.

My visual proposal is part of this personal struggle for the recognition and acceptance of "diversity" in our society. I wanted to represent how "diversity" was viewed at the end of the 1800s (the time in which the elephant man, Joseph Carey Merrick, lived). At the time, “diversity” was a “freak show” and “the different” poorly lived in the most marginal and dark places; they were considered closer to animals than to humans. They were exploited and badly treated in circuses because, at that time, the show was the absurd and diversity was the attraction.

My proposal wants to make the viewers think by placing them in front of a mirror, to take a journey through time, which in turn allows them to travel to the darkest corners of our own being and understand how much we are really willing to accept diversity and to evaluate how much we really think that "the different" are persons with their own dignity and with the right to be accepted for what they are and for what they can offer to others.