ORIENTE OCCIDENTE DANCE FESTIVAL - It's time, It's time, It's time

Mediterranei's second chapter "It's time, it's time, it's time" picks up on a speech by the very young Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate at the opening of the Youth4Climate conference in Milan in September 2021.

Indeed, Mediterranei represents a fragmented, messy place of encounters and clashes. In this space constantly, transformed by geostrategic balances between the world's east and west, it now seems impossible to ignore the timeline, between what has been-from extreme exploitation of available resources to colonialism to the disenfranchisement of women-and the consequences for what will or could be. But also, and perhaps most importantly, what is and what can be done now.
Rising temperatures; migration as a consequence of climate change, wars, poverty and the absence of security and freedom, no longer guaranteed by many countries; the world seems to be rebelling against humans through earthquakes, floods, droughts.

These issues are now at the center of public debate, experts and scientists are taking positions, activist groups are expanding and making noise. The protagonists of the protest are teenagers or so, with female leaders, from minority communities, Afro-descendants, with disabilities or neuro-disabilities, concerned and worried about their future. Artists and women artists also join alarms and produce thoughtful and denunciatory creations toward the climatic and social emergencies of our time: they will come from 16 countries from the three continents bordering the Mediterranean Sea for this 43rd edition, with which Oriente Occidente offers the invitation to continue the journey in this expanded and plural space, with a gaze that can grasp ethics and aesthetics , poetics and politics.

And when urgency calls, art responds. Not because it already knows the solution, rather because it has a special relationship with time, having often anticipated it. A way to still feel community, to exercise citizenship and, before that, humanity.