Description
In 2017, Ai Weiwei created his monumental inflatable artwork The Law of the Journey, a 70 meter long black rubber raft filled with 258 oversized, faceless refugee figures. That same year saw the world premiere of Greek composer Calliope Tsoupaki’s opera Fortress Europe at the Opera Forward Festival in Amsterdam, as well as the debut of Manthia Diawara’s film An Opera of the World at Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany. In 2018, following these works, Athena Farrokhzad wrote in her Open Letter to Europe: “Europe, 63 years before Lampedusa, Césaire wrote that you were impossible to defend. How many dead in the Mediterranean this week? Each refugee who crosses your borders is a declaration of war (...) The wretched of the earth want the prosperity they created.”Together, these artworks create a striking and urgent context for examining the enduring question of refugees in music theatre. Tsoupaki’s opera focuses explicitly on the refugee crisis, depicting its characters through references to the myth of Europa’s abduction. The narrative presents the fragile lives of refugees in a manner reminiscent of television news coverage, revealing capitalist realism as a dominant mode of representation. Diawara’s An Opera of the World is a documentary essay film that uses Bintou Wéré, a Sahel Opera (2007, premiered in Bamako, Mali) as its central narrative thread. The film reflects on migration, exile, and the cultural tensions between Africa and Europe, blending performance, archival footage, and intellectual commentary to create a layered meditation on global displacement. The opera by Wasis Diop, Koulsy Lamko (libretto), and Ze Manel (music) tells the story of a young pregnant woman seeking to reach Melilla (Spain) in hopes of securing a better future for herself and her unborn child. Conceived as a postcolonial project initiated by the late Prince Claus of the Netherlands, the opera continues its life through Diawara’s film. Diawara argues that opera provides a mirror through which to construct an aesthetic and reflective narrative—through song and dance—about the contemporary and yet timeless drama of migration and refugee crises.
In the current moment of profound global and human crisis, my aim is to explore whether, and in what ways, singing and opera that address migration, displacement, and shifting power relations across the Mediterranean can help us perceive, understand, and confront the problems of our planetary Theatrum Mundi with greater clarity.
| Period | 23 Apr 2026 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Music, Migrations and the Opera at the Mediterranean |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Hvar, CroatiaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |