Vision
Music is a universal, emotional language which reminds us, in a non rethorical way, that the human spirit is able to survive and has the urge to create beauty even under extreme deprivaton and unspeakable horros.
The 7th Concert of Memory, There where the heart lies. Notes and words of exile, undertakes to illuminate and make resound, through words and music, the experience of all those who yesterday and today, Jews and non-Jews, shared the same destiny of separation, separation and abandonment of own identity: Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, Armenians, Africans deported as slaves, Italians and Irish who embarked on the recent past in search of fortune, contemporary refugees rejected at the border or separated from their children.
Activity
The history of Israel has been marked by exile, wandering and nostalgia for the lost Paradise. It all started with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden in the first chapters of Genesis. Then the deportation to Babylon, the adventurous return from exile in Egypt through the desert – both physical and metaphorical – remembered every year during the most important religious festival of Pesach, which ends with the ritual wish, “Next year in Jerusalem”, evoking the eternal condition of the Jewish people: the wandering Jews. But exile is an experience shared by all humanity. Although the stories of exiles vary considerably – voluntary or forced, fleeing from death or misery, driven by war or hunger or forced into slavery – the condition of exile is virtually the same everywhere. Exile is the death of the past, of habits, feelings, beloved objects and one’s mother tongue; it is feeling alien and rejected, being considered inferior and undesirable. Yet, paradoxically, it is also rebirth, creativity and the chance of a new life. We dedicate the concert to all the exiles of the past and present – Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, Armenians, Africans deported as slaves to the Americas, Italians and Irish who sailed to distant continents to seek their fortune. Yazidi refugees who flee to survive, South Americans who are stopped at the frontier
and separated from their children, stateless persons, and migrants who are denied even the right to land, just like the ships full of Jews seeking to escape during World War II.