Punctual like the Sanremo Festival or the football championship it arrives tonight (Teatro Antico, 9.30 pm) the Taobuk Gala, with its wave of guests and prize winners. As every year, the recognition was awarded by the Festival’s Scientific Committee to personalities of the highest literary, artistic, scientific or civil commitment profile and tonight’s evening, hosted by Antonella Ferrara and Massimiliano Ossini and broadcast on RaiDue on 8 Julywill see its crucial moment in the delivery of the Taobuk Award for Literary Excellence to three writers: Norwegian Jon Fosse2023 Nobel Prize for Literature, to the American Jonathan Safran Foerwho in «Everything is illuminated» reveals to the reader the search for his own roots, along a biographical path in which pain and love, past and present continuously intersect; and the Spanish Fernando Aramburu who will collect the Taobuk Award from the hands of the Spanish Ambassador to Italy, Miguel Ángel Fernández-Palacios Martìnez.
For the visual arts, the prize will go to the performing artist of Serbian origins Marina Abramovićwelcomed in Taormina like a star, who identified the awareness of identity in the ability and willingness to trust each other, in an interaction that is a continuous rediscovery of oneself. For the cinema, the Taobuk Award, created by the goldsmith atelier Le Colonne di Alvaro e Correnti, for cinema it will go to the directors Paolo Sorrentino and Ferzan Özpetek and to the actress Kasia Smutniak; for music to the tenor Riccardo Massi and Noemi; for dance to the star of the Teatro alla Scala Nicoletta Manniambassador of classical ballet in the world, and to the choreographer and dancer Moses Pendletondirector and founder of Momix and for the information to the Adnkronos journalist Elvira Terranova.
For the creator and artistic director of Taobuk, Antonella Ferrara, “the great guests who will be honored with the award during the Gala, with their work have given voice, body and substance to this perpetual dialogue between us and others, which is at the basis of the very concept of identity. To understand who we are – and why we are – the fundamental step, in fact, is to go out of ourselves, following that extraordinary experience that is the knowledge and acceptance of the other”.
Last night a Nobel of few words gave a chat to the Taobuk audience. The conversion to Catholicism, loneliness, the bad relationship with social media, the habit of writing at dawn and the obsession with form. In Norway he has been famous since the 1980s, as a playwright, but the 2023 Nobel gave him world fame “and destroyed my life”, he admits smiling. «A glow», the last one, «Sectology», «Melancholia», «Morning and evening» are his, strange, works: some without punctuation, others with characters who bear the same name. He himself is a strange character: cell phone on silent mode, no one calls him, no one answers, with some exceptions for family members. Because, he says, concentration in his work is everything. Does writing change from different geographies? «Yes, I look at you and if I raise my eyes I see a different landscape than that of my childhood. My world is quieter but every writer has their own voice.” The theme is the unspeakable: «You can describe all human experiences, existential situations and feelings in literature in a way that you cannot do with other means. I like to create something that wasn’t there before. And that’s new to me too. Otherwise I’ll be bored.”