Fondazione Merz

Events

Nabil Bey Salameh “Il mare ricorda” (The Sea Remembers)

music, words and images 

 

a journey through sounds, silences, stories and poetic fragments, inviting audiences to listen to Gaza beyond the image of destruction: as a living place shaped by culture, imagination, layered histories, and human and symbolic resistance

 

9 June at 7 pm. – free admission

In a time of rubble and narratives reduced to mere news, Gaza risks being told only through the grammar of destruction. Numbers, ruins, military maps, borders, emergencies.
Gaza, before being the epicentre of a contemporary tragedy, was for millennia a gateway to the Mediterranean. A place of passage and encounter, a port of civilisation, a living archive of languages, trade, music, stories, and human layers. To destroy a city also means trying to break the invisible continuity that links human beings to their places, their dead, their memories, and their sounds.
It means striking at a people’s very right to tell their own story.
Yet, some things resist destruction. The ancient breath of the sea resists. The lullabies of mothers, the lamentations, the cries of the markets, the stories told in homes, the names of vanished villages, the poetry kept in the voice, the stubborn rhythm of daily life—all resist. Beauty resists.
This journey then tries to become an archaeology of listening: a crossing of sonic, literary, and human memories to bring to light not only the pain, but above all the presence. An ancient and living presence, which continues to inhabit the Mediterranean like a restless and necessary conscience.
The event is part of the Public Program accompanying the exhibition GAZA: the Future Has an Ancient Heart — a rich calendar of talks, workshops, music, theatre, cinema, and editorial presentations that expand upon and deepen the themes explored in the exhibition. The programme also expresses a profound and supportive bond of solidarity through an engaged international and local cultural network.
The public and private institutions involved include: Università per Stranieri di Siena, Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino, Lettera 22 Roma, Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino, Riwaq Center for Architectural Conservation, Fondazione MeNo Palermo, Hawaf Collective Paris/Gaza, Libreria Trebisonda Torino, Associazione Festival delle Colline Torinesi, Museo Archeologico Castromediano Lecce, MAO – Museo d’Arte Orientale Torino, PAV – Parco Arte Vivente Torino, Fondazione Lac o Le Mon San Cesario di Lecce, Tedacà Torino, SeSaMO – Società per gli Studi sul Medio Oriente Torino, Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research, OTO Sound Museum, APS Zenzero – Arci, Vento di Terra ONG.