Genova
Suq
Located at the Piazza della Feste in the Porto Antico, the Suq Festival has developed as a well-established platform to display and combine the traditions of the migrants and other cultures, and thus opened its programmes to give visibility to the melting process that had been assisted by MELT. The MELT project was first presented to the Genoese audience within the setting of the 10th edition of the Suq Festival in 2008. A "travelling" musician from Birmingham presented a taste of "melting" in a joint performance with the local Bailam orchestra, and set the course for MELT in Genoa 2009.
In preparation for this grand finale a series of "melting" events were organised: the students theatre workshop "The Journey of a Migrant", based on the exchange of young people from Genoa and Birmingham, which had taken place in spring 2009 with a performance at Golden Hillock School in Birmingham, was relaunched again in rehearsal for the performance scheduled for the MELT day at the Suq Festival in June.
The musicians of the sub-project "MakingMusi" reviewed their musical repertoire, which they had developed in Munich during the Soundlab, and continued the experiment of performing in restaurants and open spaces in Genoa. Their performance on stage at the Suq Festival started the finishing night of the festival, followed by their joint act with members of the Genoese group La Banda di Piazza Caricamento developed within the workshop led by Davide Ferrari the days before.
Simultaneously with the Suq Festival 2009 representatives from Birmingham, Munich, Istanbul, Vienna and Sighişoara rejoined their Italian colleagues for the public conference "Cultural Activities/Institutions and Integration Processes – Culture as an emancipation factor" held at Berio Library. Lectures and discussions on the core motives of MELT and the overall topic of cultural initiatives promoting the process of integration in Europe were paired with audio visual samples resulting from two years of artistic collaboration. The Melting Pot Symphony was certainly one of its numerous pieces of evidence: Premiered in March 2009 during Mega MELT in Birmingham, the many-voiced, transnational experiment accompanied the closing ceremony with a performance in the keynote of MELT: music.
Shaker
The title of the project "Shaker" was the motto that collected all MELT activities in Genoa: "Let's shake up our traditional ideas, let’s shake up our attitudes and our ways of looking at each other!" Based on research conducted by the MEDI’ Study Center of the University of Genoa ("Active research among the Bands of Younger Latin-Americans Living in Genoa") and by the CeDriTT Center for Documentation and research Technology Transfer ("Cultural Expectations of Immigrant Citizens Living in our City"), the Cultural Department of Genoa launched several activities to promote inclusion of the various ethnic minorities in the city. La Banda di Piazza Caricamento, a band made up of musicians with migrant background, was supported as a symbol of intercultural dialogue.
Go back or to the project's website.