Berlin migrants concert with Italian painter
Initiative for integration with Mancini's works
05 December,
(ANSAmed) -
BERLIN - Paintings by the Italian artist Fernanda Mancini have been chosen by a
German foundation to be part of a musical initiative focusing on refugee
integration in the capital. The exhibition was inaugurated last week in the
Berlin headquarters of Friedrich Ebert Stiftung for a concert entitled
"Grenzklaenge" (''Border Sounds'') and presented as a ''journey
through the Turkish, Arab, Persian and European cultural space''. Performing
were scholarship-holders of the SPD-linked foundation as well as migrants and
refugees in the concert, which aimed to use ''music as a bridge towards
integration''. The paintings exhibited by Mancini, who has shuttled between
Rome and Berlin for the past 20 years, are an attempt to bring together the "Tripeditrip"
poetry of China's Gu Cheng (where the exhibition has taken its name from) and
the music of Beijing maestro Peng Yin, which was in turn created on the basis
of Cheng's poetry. ''I was heavily influenced by the freshness of natural
elements - the wind, the water and the trees - in Peng's music,'' the artist
told ANSAmed, and ''the blow of Cheng's words''. To make them visible, Mancini
said that she had sought ''a combination of natural elements and other very
symbolic, universal, ones'' such as fish, which ''is a symbol that unifies all
humanity and is found at the basis of all cultures''. The concert, which
offered music by Bartok and Beethoven as well as an emerging band of Turkish
and Palestinian origins, was organized in collaboration with Xenion, a center
for ''pyscho-social assistance for those persecuted for political reasons''.
The center is ''one of the few in Berlin'' with translators at is disposal to
treat more adequately the psychological consequences of the horrors refugees
are fleeing from, according to the presentation. The issue of migration is very
high on the list of priorities in the German political agenda and social
debate. The Christian Democrats- SPD coalition government has made clear
attempts to get the country to accept a limited influx of refugees in integrate
into the economy of a country that like other European ones is aging.
(ANSAmed).
