On June 18th at the Baden Powell Park in Potenza at 6.30pm “The imaginative story of Espérer” arrives, a sung fairy tale that started in April from Lampedusa and is crossing the whole of Italy, passing through cities, towns, seas, between the south and northern Italy, up to Bardonecchia.
The show is staged in Potenza by Antonio Damasco, director and creator, with Laura Conti, Maurizio Verna, Mico Corapi of the Teatro delle Forme of Turin with the Fondazione Città della Pace per i Bambini Basilicata.
Esperer’s island began to take shape in 2015, when Antonio Damasco, playwright, actor and director of the Italian Network of Popular Culture found himself having to explain to his two little girls what was happening on the rocks of Ventimiglia. Starting from June of that year, people from the poorest countries on the African continent, in transit through Italy and headed for France, stopped on the border line, taking shelter on the rocks for over four months. From that experience an allegorical fable was born, transferred into a book illustrated by Alice Tortoroglio: “The imaginative story of Espérer” and a theatrical show that looks at Europe in 2050. Since 2016 the fable that transforms the drama of migrants into utopia of an island without borders, has also become a project of shared participation from below, through a symbolic certificate of existence, while the show, starting from Turin, progressively expands into a national tour involving the cities of Genoa, Benevento, Foggia, Lecce, Palermo and the municipalities of Cambiano, Casciana Terme, San Lazzaro di Savena (BO), San Sepolcro (AR), Carrara and Alessandria.
Espérer has a registry office, in which we could find the names of millions of men and women who left Italy for Belgium, France, Germany, but also Argentina, the United States and many others. Even today there are thousands of people looking for the island outside this country, in the last ten years alone over 82,000 Italians, mostly young, have set out on the move. While other men, women and children try to reach Europe through the Mediterranean and the Balkan route with the same desperate need, often rejected by a Europe that seems not to have understood in the last thirty years how to manage flows, resources and possibilities, but above all the stories of those who are arriving. But Espérer speaks to young people because the inhabitants of the island that exist are those boys and girls in need of a “Certificate of Existence” towards Espérer to start dreaming again.
This initiative is part of the “migrAzioni 2024” program organized by the Fondazione Città della Pace per i Bambini Basilicata which aims to celebrate the “World Refugee Day” as part of the reception activities of the SAI projects with photographic exhibitions, documentaries, cultural events and sportsmen. From May 13th to June 28th, the inhabitants of various centers in Basilicata that host refugees will be involved to remember that in 2023 over 117 million people were forced to flee due to wars and persecution according to UNHCR data. The initiative is financed with the resources of the SAI project promoted by the Municipality of Potenza, in co-planning with ARCI Basilicata, Consorzio Officine Sociali and the Cooperativa la Mimosa within the social animation activities and is hosted at the Baden Powell Park thanks to the Cooperative social Venus.
