A message from Artistic Director, Giorgio Magnanensi

Touch from a distance

Dear friends,

At a time where we find ourselves struggling and unable to fully understand, while navigating in very uncertain times, we need to strongly support each other. Not only to ease our way during this tragic time, but also to protect the values that our communities hold dear: the importance and power of creative energy and imagination, the powerful vision of sound thinking and of all creative thinking as important and fruitful activities through which we inquire into our lives and the world we live in, and foster communities’ imaginations without being sentimental or aesthetically ideological.

I have always held dear what Suzi Gablik once said about Art intended as a ‘behaviour and a vehicle of group meaning.’ A way to make things special, taking care of the world and each other, to move, together, toward new visions that would embrace and foster the importance of difference as the flower of any society that is able to value creativity, beauty, personal expression and the power of imagination.

In this moment, more than ever before, our different visions need to find a common ground, to become a new vision that would help us to redefine how to support and sustain, through any creative practice, the fabric of our community, the loneliness, the elders, the ones we left behind and all the fragilities and inequalities of our communities. To nurture ourselves within the love and respect for the beautiful land we inhabit and treasure as our gifted home.

In this time I often find myself in need of rethinking what makes our creative work necessary, what community really means, and ultimately trying to find a place where, in spite of social distancing, we can reunite our forces around a global vision of solidarity that could tie together the necessity of our activities and everyone’s creative work to the full human spirit in these critical, tragic and extremely challenging times.

As you already know VNM, and many other sister organizations, have had to shut down all scheduled programs and events for the time being, but at the same time we wish to continue to activate dialogue and connection among artists and the community at large. We will start very soon with a couple of projects that we hope will engage the community and a number of local musicians, and we also hope we will able to contribute some soothing space for everyone feeling the weight of isolation and distancing.

Just recently a friend reminded me of American psychologist Anne Fernald who describes the musicality of infant directed speech as “touch from a distance” because babies learn what parents mean through the melody of their speech, and respond emotionally to what they hear musically. Inspired by this image and analogy we hope we can support each other within sonic touches from a distance, looking forward to the time we will be able to reunite and gather again in a renewed vision full of that empathy and joy that sound would have nurtured in these times, while building on our best emotions and creative energies: a touch from a distance that would carry long lasting changes and new visions that no language would be ever able to fully express.

– Giorgio Magnanensi