‘I asked my grandfather when I was young about the history of our family. And he told me pretty clearly, that he didn’t really say anything. He was very silent. And I always say, that it’s a silence that taught me never to ask him this question again. But then the reality is that inside all of this silence is nothing but sound, pain, betrayal, screaming, crying, loss. Though, the idea of this project is to find this sound in the silence’ – says Dan Wolf, artistic director of the project.
Sound in the Silence is an intercultural and international remembrance project for youth. At historically challenging locations students work with artists representing different artistic fields in order to understand how the past is connected to their questions in the present. By doing so, we give young people a chance to find new ways of looking at the history of Europe, of our nations, states, regions, and to work out their own perception of reality and tools for expressing it.
The main theme of this year’s edition was ‘Remembrance and Oblivion’, and it was held at the House of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, Germany, and Jasenovac Memorial Site, established near Jasenovac in Croatia. Those were the locations, associated with the events that took place in 1942 at a villa in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, and at the Jasenovac concentration camps, where around 100,000 people perished between 1941 and 1945.
For eight days, an international group of up to 28 students worked together with professional artists to create a performance based on their reflections and emotional responses to the programme, bringing together acting, dance, sound and creative writing.
During educational and artistic workshops, the youth, working with testimonial texts and oral history accounts, had the opportunity to look at individual recollections and juxtapose them with collective memory. Confronted with the understanding that forgetting painful events in the history of nations or communities may sometimes be a part of remembering. They also discussed the assertion that nurturing memory of history is one of the most important elements in the formation of one’s identity.
Have a look back at some of the special moments from this year's edition of the project here
Read more about the 'Sound in the SIlence' project here
Project is co-financed by the European Commission’s programme Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values programme (CERV).