I am here today as a Culturescapes Artistic Advisory Board member because I met Jurriaan Cooiman, the festival's director, at a dance festival, Africa Simply the Best, in Burkina Faso two years ago.
Festivals are a wonderful place of encounters.
Today's world, more than ever, needs such spaces. One may be tempted to think that with our ever-connected world, with the internet, with social media, we have already encountered each other, we are encountering each other every day. But it is not enough; many of our mechanisms of encounter are superficial, too fleeting.
Herein lies the beauty of a festival like Culturescapes that offers a long deep-dive in the landscapes of different cultures, histories, and geopolitics.
The challenges we as a global community face today are enormous, many intractable without genuine dialogue and collaboration. Last month, the beleaguered UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, opened the debate at the United Nations General Assembly by saying: we were at a make-or-break moment. Reform or rupture, he said. Our world is becoming unhinged, he said. Geopolitical tensions are rising. Global challenges are mounting – the climate emergency, multiple migration crises, runaway artificial intelligence... And we seem incapable of coming together to respond, was his assessment.
Festivals like Culturescapes wager that our ability to come together to respond can be increased through exposure to art from other cultures. Art is an attempt to understand the world. And art, in its diverse forms, can offer the utmost experience of otherness.
That understanding of our world, not just the micro world of our mundane everyday existences, but all the worlds that our humanity inhabits, is critical for our ability to address issues together. That experience of otherness, of putting yourself in someone else's shoes, is essential to the solidarity that is often lacking within and between communities.
Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ said about intolerance: "Intolerance, which is closely linked to ignorance and spiritual immaturity, is not confined to any particular race or community. It is a human disease common to all …. Lurking in some obscure zone of our being, intolerance constantly threatens to draw out its claws as soon as we encounter in the other a difference that we cannot understand."
The performances, artworks, and public talks that compose Culturescapes 2023 Sahara will offer you all different attempts to understand the vast region of the Sahara, both its calamities and joys (for a region is never just calamity), as well as its visions for the future. And hopefully, some of those claws that are visible in the chain of migration from the Sahara to the Mediterranean, the claws that are visible in climate change negotiations, and so on, will be trimmed.
The opening performance comes to us from Burkina Faso, a country dear to me. It's title C la Vie, reminds us of something we all have in common—life. We can choose to read the title in English as that's life, which implies a certain resignation; or we can choose to read it as this is life, as a joyful affirmation, a grasping of the possibilities that this common condition called life offers us. Yes, C'est la vie!
Photos: Mathew Lee/Roche
