Rosa Uliassi

Today, it’s two months that I’ve been living in Brighton. I decided to move here because I wanted to improve my English. I had never heard it before, but London seemed too big and too busy for my first experience in England, so I prefered this small and colourful city by the sea. The most surprising thing of Brighton is its surreal atmosphere. Brighton give you the home welcoming and the world vastity, together. This is an incredibly virtue for an international city, where thousands of human beings from all over the world meet and cross theirself, every day, in a endless interactions complex. And in a such tiny space!

Two weeks ago, I was in a house party with about fifty people (crazy, I know!) and I couldn’t count how many nationalities there were, in the same place, in the same time! When I start thinking about this, I can feel my heart gets vibrant, opening and smiling because I undestand how much it’s important to enter in direct contact with every human being face. The human face, his personal identity, being one in front of each other, is the most powerful tool to break down any wall and prejudice in a spontaneous and easy way, because it involves a immediate relationship with the other. This brings me to a sentence by Hannah Arendt, one of my favorite philosopher, who thought that the ‘face’ was the only one real expression of human life: «acting and speaking human beings show who they are, in their real unique personal identity and, in this way, they can appear in the human world».

The human world is the world of relationships and dialogue, without prejudices, tags or political ideologies. In my experience, Brighton is the plural background of this incredible human world. This city is making me understand how the concept of identity and, first of all, the concept of belonging are the result of choice. They can be recovered in a space which can be built and shared with the others whoever they are, because it goes over the traditional sense of identity. In this space of freedom and interaction, each difference is vital to enrich the background, and each person with his human experiences and ideas is, above all, hisself with his values and fragilities.

Rosa Uliassi

The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of the author, and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of ALDA and the European Union.