Foto alessandro proto biography

Art is one means of gifting each other the wholeness of life.
2010-2011.
Alessandro Mendini was born in Milan in 1931 and graduated in the same city, at the local Polytechnic.

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Alessandro Mendini

Internationally recognised as a refined scholar of a sui generis approach to the object (be it a building or a design) which is rooted in the close relationship between art and design, with a particular focus on the use of colour, and a subtle and constant vein of irony, he was, from the outset, very critical of the consumerist society, and constantly walked the line between inspiration from, on the one hand, the world of literature and, on the other, the world of pictures and paintings that had accompanied him since his early childhood.

His weresome of the most iconic moments in Italian production over the last sixty years, from the Proust armchair (1978), to the countless collections of objects designed for Alessi, a multitude of products which – as noted by the most recent and attentive commentators – retraces the obsession of Mendini's surrogate father Ponti for a very restrictive group of fundamental themes (the Ponti ideario) analysed in an endless and diachronic series of forms.

This took place through a practice which was typical of t

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Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore the development of political rap in Rome as an example of glocalization, i.e. the refraction of universalizing processes (the worldwide diffusion of American hip-hop, including its political sub-genre heir of black protest music and its connection with the Afro-American struggle in New York) through local backgrounds (the tradition of Italian revolutionary music and its relation with the history of class struggle in the country). Furthermore, it will address the current state of the art, trying to draw some conclusions on its future.

1. The DNA of New Yorker rap

1.1. Black music and Afro-American liberation

As prof. Alessandro Portelli told me when I interviewed him, the relationship between black music and Afro-American liberation has always been tight as Western African music was deeply community-driven. Initially the calls for emancipation used to be mostly under Christian symbology in the music known as spirituals, but after the end of the Civil War they had been increasingly more explicit in the derivative

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