The Twilight of the Society
“Mankind cannot stand too much reality”.
T.S. Eliot wrote this in his Four Quartets. To face a reality like the
outskirts of Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia, is not easy. Surrounded by green
hills and large prairies, where horses gallop freely, the only unquestionable masters of
this land, a small gorge, leading to the core of the Mongolian capital
city is the theater of a horrifying scenario, degrading , for all
mankind. Here,
the lo west level of the consumption society fights everyday for
surviving. A pyramid of waste is the only source of living for this
people: the reclamation of plastic materials, metal, glass, is the only
possible source of revenue. In a Mongolia sacked and robbed of
its natural resources by the super powers China and Russia; in a
Mongolia corrupted and stuck between the frenzy for progress and
the research for its identity, there are persons who are serving their
sentence without any crime, who are paying the price of social
inequality. To move away, to distance, to filter reality to change its
look, to cover it, to make it up, to hide it, not to recognize it for
what it is: a useless attempt to protect oneself, to preserve the
feelings, the sensations that would be hurt and torn in
front of such a scenario. Thus, hidden behind an dirty and scratched
glass, that transforms and
makes the live in front unreal, I approached a world that is the symbol
of the twilight of any form of society. If a population allows that
some persons are forced to ferret about in the waste and garbage,
the
well ness we are aiming at is a mere illusion that does not elevate
mankind but leads it to self-destruction. This work has the purpose to
denounce and tell about what happens in this part of the Mongolian
land, crushed between blind and careless consumerism and the mute and
self-possessed despair of these persons.