Pictures often speak louder than words. We learned this following Milan's Human Rights Festival (fifth edition), which focused on disability. The event's title—Up Close, No One Is Disabled—brought together experts and witnesses to challenge stereotypes and reflect on a category of people whose basic rights remain among the most violated: access to health care, employment, mobility, education, the vote, and free choice of how to live. The festival was meant to be fundamentally educational, engaging students from several secondary schools and the University of Milan, running across multiple venues over an extended period. The Covid emergency forced organizers to shrink it to a single online format. Technical failures marred the first day and part of the second, disrupting streaming for many viewers. A supplementary day of sessions was added to compensate. Still, the website offers plenty to explore, and recordings remain available for those who want to revisit conversations.
One criticism: the festival reached beyond disability to other forms of marginalization—mental illness, immigration, carceral institutions—in ways that risked diluting focus on the specific condition of disability as defined by the UN Convention that has been the binding framework for disability rights since 2006.
The spectrum of disability is already so vast and so poorly represented that it runs constant risk of erasure. As writer Claudia Durastanti noted in her remarks, disability exposes a fragility that we all carry but spend our lives trying to forget—a point the sociologist Ciro Tarantino underscored by citing Julia Kristeva.
Special mention belongs to the carefully curated selection of photographs, short films, documentaries, and features that told disability's story. Photographer Paolo Manzo met Mario, paralyzed after a diving accident. Their encounter became a visual narrative titled M: three inflections of a single letter in Mario's life, in his mother's, and in their unbroken bond with the sea in Naples. A life that increasingly depends on his mother's strength to remain an active member of his community. The reportage enters Mario's daily, intimate world with tangible care.
Or the short film The Cardboard Chair, in which Marco Zuin documents the creation of a simple, ingenious—and beautiful—object for a Kenyan boy. Before the chair arrived, the child, who has severe hydrocephalus, could only be held by his mother on a sofa or in her arms. The chair opened new possibilities and, crucially, made him visible to his community. Fashioned from skillful, creative hands and often-discarded materials that are nonetheless light and strong, the chair itself is deeply moving.
Photographs like those by Paola Cominetta documenting colorblindness (see images below), and documentaries—When We Walk, À l'école des Philosophes, and L'estate più bella, all previewed on the festival's Vimeo channel—are essential tools for building empathy with the lived experience they depict. They are the first step toward the necessary shift in how we see and feel. Luigi Manconi, speaking with characteristic force in one of the conversations, reminded us that Italy suffers from a "persistent, stubborn, utterly entrenched backwardness in civic sense"* precisely toward people with disabilities. That is something we urgently need to fix.
* (He used this phrase after the moderator had introduced his voice as stentorian rather than thundering.)