The Promised Land Festival took place in the Plum Yard from 20th to 23rd of September 2018. Three performances among the ones created in Milano have been presented in the wider frame of the international festival.
The event opened with the conference Life Meeting. For this event Continuo team decided to look at the migration topic from the Czech country historical perspective. As a country, which passed through several foreign dominations in the contemporary history, Czech Republic (former Czechoslovakia) has been traversed by several waves of migration (being both Czechoslovakian people migration abroad and receiving citizens from bordering countries).
Three lecturers from different fields have been invited to share with the audience their perspectives on the topic. The first lecturer, Marek Šindelka, is a Czech writer author of the book Fatigue of material (2017), a novel about a young refugee escaping from the war and aiming to reach the Northern Europe. For this novel, Marek Šindelka has been awarded with the Magnesia Litera prize. The second lecturer, Professor Niklas Perzi, is researcher at the Institute for the History of Rural Studies in St. Pölten (AU) and member of the Center for Migration Research. His intervention addressed the different migration waves happened in Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1945, and the ways in which citizens of the bordering countries perceived each other, in this underlying similarities and differences with the attitudes towards nowadays migration. The third lecturer, Thomas Samhaber (AU), is leading project manager for “ILD Temper-Samhaber KG – Agency for Regional Development”. He shared with the audience the outcomes of the volutary project he carried out in the last four years with refugees of his region, the Waldviertel, how this project impacted the life of the region’s inhabitants on cultural, social and financial level.
The conference has been moderated by Professor Salim Murad.
The three-days festival program included: three micro-dramas by students from Czech Republic, Slovakia and Rumania; the projection of two documentary movies; three performances for children and family; five performances for adult audience, among which one concert and one dance and improvised music performance; one workshop; two culinary programs. The invited artists, when possible, stayed in Plum Yard after the performance, by this creating the possibility to encounter the audience and the students. Promised Land festival also created a moment, in which the local community could experience the Plum Yard in a different way, experience a variety of artistic proposals and meet artists and students coming from abroad.