Flavia Gervasi
Research project
The political dimension of musical creation: an interdisciplinary study of a world music festival in southern Italy
Project summary
In the early 1990s, against a backdrop of geopolitical transformation with the fall of the Berlin Wall and, later, waves of immigration from North Africa, Salento, a sub-region of southern Italy, resumed its former role as a “terra di confine” and meeting place for Mediterranean cultures. The image of a welcoming, cosmopolitan territory will be conveyed by political discourse, while a music born of peasant tradition and rewritten and blended on the occasion of a major world music festival since 1998, will become its emblem.
What’s remarkable about this festival is the way it brings us back first to the question of territorial identity and then, through it, to strategies for promoting a territory through musical creation. It also remains a fascinating example of the relationship between the musical and the political, and of the means by which politics appropriates the “re-symbolizing” capacity of the musical. The aim of this study is not simply to understand the event itself, but to reveal a complex social and political process. The interdisciplinary approach adopted aims to study together the processes of identity construction and the political dimension, musical creation and the public.
