RESEARCH - VIDEOS WATCHED
The Identity's Driver: Marco Belinelli moving to USA
Marco Belinelli is an Italian basketball player ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uobITONhmmQ , watched on 21/10/2018). He moved to USA 11 year ago and played for 9 NBA teams. He won the NBA title in 2014 with San Antonio Spurs. The year after, he changed team again and, at the end, for the season 2018/2019, he will be back in San Antonio.
I was impressed to watch an interview where Belinelli states about his return to San Antonio: "........I feel I am back home......".
These words made me reflect about what drives the identity's perception/feeling of a person.
Thanks to transports and technologies, professional work exchange from one side, as a result of economic and social enormous problems from another, this the era of migrations and people moving from one place to another.
I believe then, that nowadays, the identity's theme is more actual than ever. The big question is if each one, moving from his/her birthplace to another place, another country, another social group, could move his/her own identity as well, or will change at least a part of it.
Is identity related only to the place and the social group where we live, is it a matter of the past, of "here and now", or both?
If identity is related to the sense of belonging to a group or a "tribe", Marco Belinelli feels to belong to the Spurs' tribe and identifies himself with this group/team/city. Or, maybe, he included this group/team/city in what makes his identity: home.
If identity is related to the sense of belonging to a group or a "tribe", Marco Belinelli feels to belong to the Spurs' tribe and identifies himself with this group/team/city. Or, maybe, he included this group/team/city in what makes his identity: home.
You are what you wear: Christina Dean on TED
Dr. Christina Dean is a journalist and founder of Redress, an NGO that promotes environmental sustainability in the fashion industry.
In the youtube video "You are what you wear" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cduGLWhm1LM, watched on 21/10/2018) she speaks about the chief editor of Vogue Usa, Anna Wintour, who stated that "....Fashion is a reflection of our times...".
Dean was deeply depressed about this statement, because she knows that production and waste of clothes, just for the sake of fashion (clothes get old not because they are used, but because they are out of fashion), pollute our planet.
In the same video, Dean states that "....Clothes do have the big power to change the way that we feel and the way that we act."
I found this video looking for material related to keywords "moving" and "identity". What has this video to do with identity?
Providing that, as written in the study book, "...identity is, and always has been, a contentious phenomenon...", if we are and we act according to what we wear, all this has surely something to do with our identity, or the way we (temporarily?) change it.
I am inspired by the relation between clothes and identity, and I expect to make use of this inspiration in my assignments.
I remember too that, studying the "Context And Narrative" unit, I researched on Nikki S. Lee's Projects and found a statement by Carol Kino:
'EVEN after a long face-to-face conversation, it’s hard to say for certain what Nikki S. Lee is really like. That’s partly because this South Korean-born artist has always trafficked in her unnerving talent for assuming different identities.'
(Now in Moving Pictures: The Multitudes of Nikki S. Lee', The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/arts/design/01kino.html (accessed on 22/10/2017).
Nikki Lee uses clothes and make ups in order to project her "fake" identity in different contexts. So, do really clothes make who we are?
Is identity only the real identity or could it be what we show it is?
Is identity only the real identity or could it be what we show it is?
Reflection Point
I believe that the two videos helped me to reflect on the following point:
"...tend to my weeds...": the basketball player feels at home when he wears the team shirt; Christina Dean shows who she is and the way she acts, according to the clothes she wears.
Does it mean that, if I wear some clothes (i.e. blue jeans) should I be identified as somebody who does not care of environment? Should I feel bad, or not belonging to my where I live?
I believe that to be myself means, for me, feeling and act like I feel wherever and whenever I am, without any filter or pose.