When I come home… I’ll tell the children (Chapter two)

Editorial by Stefano Lavorini.  

Years back, at the closure of the umpteenth edition of interpack, I wrote an editorial in which I tried to describe the unreal sense I experienced in abandoning the collective dimension of daily action, after long days spent at the fair. The bewilderment one suddenly feels in finding oneself outside that spatial-temporal continuum in which all the world, faithful to the equilibrium of supply and demand, seemed to resolve itself. A black hole in which everything had been sucked into, before expanding once again to take possession of the universe.

* Miroslaw Balka CROSSOVER / S 16 March - 30 July 2017 Pirelli Hangar Bicocca Centre of Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw.

Today (May 9 2017) a day after the end of this “monster” edition, I am back to once again feeling something of that old sentiment… the force of necessity that knows no rest.

Many, obviously, the changes: the visitors and exhibitors are even more, aboveall in numerical terms from the Asia Pacific area; all machine builders talk about  Industry 4.0, a pass towards any kind of innovation headed never mind how in the direction of production flexibility, guided first-hand by the consumer market; and again the materials and packaging producers as well converters in their eternal quest to reconcile sustainability with savings, conditioned as things always have been by old hitches in supplier-customer relations (notably the brand owners).

After days of encounters and re-encounters (what a lot of new faces!), after alternating moments of calm and tension that tested ones senses and bodily strength, the summing up of shouted out slogans and half-whispered truths, I already acknowledge a subtle though resilient string of things lacking and nostalgia that I resolve to overcome, harping on collective recollections and things experienced personally, symbolic, temporal and spatial hybrids or crossovers.

In actual fact one starts out again with faith in the fact that each individual leaves a sign of their own passing, like “leaving ones imprint on a bar of soap in a slow state of disintegration"*.
Though means and times are at ones discretion!