To understand who we are and why we are
The fundamental step is to go out of oneself, going through that extraordinary experience that is the knowledge and acceptance of the other. Living in the awareness that there is no identity without otherness means helping to plant the seed of mutual and plural respect. It is the true great mission of Culture. This is the lesson that the festival assimilates and conveys through the masters of thought that has the privilege of hosting. You have in your hands the program of the XIV edition of Taobuk. Scroll through the various thematic paths of the program, which has as its guiding word IDENTITY.
Plural identities, in perpetual becoming
as evoked by the visual logo elaborated by Arnaldo Pomodoro.Are you thinking what you will come to listen among many presentations, round tables, reading and shows. Everything that takes place feverishly over five days, from Thursday 20 to Monday 24 June, is the result of a year of work that, as it happens since the first edition, I and the team of Taobuk organize in this beautiful place where we are lucky to work: Taormina.
A result that is possible thanks to the support of the Sicilian Region and the public and private realities that believe in the project of a multidisciplinary festival and from a truly international perspective. In this year, to a bloody and close war already underway, the one between Ukraine and Russia, another has been added, yet another from the Middle East.
How can a festival that for many editions has invited writers and artists, economists and scientists to talk about creativity and beauty give an account of all this pain? Yet the answer seemed clear to us: the books, the words, the images that culture continues to create are one of the ways we have to ask ourselves who we are and who others are. Our multiple identities accepted by others, and reciprocally respected, are the hope that me and the other, us and them, become a confrontation and not a clash. Investigating identity is the task we set ourselves in this 14th edition of Taobuk and it is also, why not, our response to the ongoing conflicts.
Identity is always changing, identity is an imprint that does not erase those of others.
The intent is to recover a concept of identity that always has at its center our relationship with the other, our being with the world, quoting Emmanuel Lévinas, as a determining factor of our being in the world. Buon festival.
Antonella Ferrara Creator and artistic director of Taobuk
