Greeting

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year 2024.

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Bach's Ciaccona is a grand story of Life and Eternity. Adriana Alcaide's video is one of the most beautiful videos I've come across. With Ana Maria Krajnc and Bach's six sonatas for violin and cembalo obbligato, Adriana opens and closes our festival on August 9 and 23, 2024.

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As another guide for the year 2024, we present to you the thought of the Roman writer Caius Salustius Crispus (86-35 BC) from Bellum Iugurthinum (War with Jugurtha): But the leader and ruler of man's life is the mind, and when this advances to glory by the path of virtue, it has power and potency in abundance, as well as fame; and it needs not fortune, since fortune can neither give to any man honesty, diligence, and other good qualities, nor can she take them away.

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Since art is an important area of social relations with all the responsibility of artists towards public life, we asked the artists of the Seviqc 2023 festival for a recommendation to the presidents of the countries, their prime ministers and ministers of culture and members of parliament. This is the message of those who responded to our request.

 

SEVIQC 2023 ARTIST STATEMENT

Equal education to all the people, rich and poor. High quality of public education. More importance to artistic knowledges in the schools. Promoting artistic events in the normal everyday life of the schools and educational plans. Artists collaborating in schools, in difficult neighbourhoods, in prisons, shelters, hospitals. Allowing more activities of celebration with acoustic music, dance, visual arts... Promoting the young groups of the country to be the guides of the coming generations. (Adriana Alcaide, Spain)

I would like that they could appreciate culture as a basic way to guarantee the well-being of the people and as a really important tool for our life together as a community. (Carles Blanch, Spain)

Respect art and artists. Respect their time and work. Although many times the work of an artist is difficult to evaluate, difficult to statistically calculate, difficult to verify the results, it is a work that holds water in the long run and that educates, complements our lives, and gives salt and pepper to all existence. (Izidor Erazem Grafenauer, Slovenia)

That their work should be, above all, the work of open ears and hearts. To focus on actions and less on words. (Mojca Jerman, Slovenia)

Even if they don’t bring obvious and immediate financial rewards, it is important for society to cultivate culture, which helps bringing people together. (Fiona Kizzie Lee, Hong Kong)

First of all, I would tell presidents of states, prime ministers, ministers of culture and other leaders in key positions that they should give art an important place in their personal and professional lives - I would invite them to attend cultural events as often as possible because through them it will be easier to stay in authentic contact with a part of the population that forms the healthy core and driving force of society. At the same time, with the help and support of culture, they will be more in touch with themselves and in this way will reach their full potential. Culture is the art of being, the art of living; it constantly returns us to the origin and re-establishes contact within us, with our essence, with the truth that resides in each of us. Furthermore, I would promote the awareness that to achieve this noble goal culture needs top (professional) artists who can fully devote themselves to art without constant existential pains. A culture that is at the mercy of current fads sooner or later degenerates into pop culture. Culture and art are extremely unifying elements and to achieve their purpose they need the financial and moral support of society and all individuals who assume leading positions on its behalf. (Ana Julija Mlejnik Železnik, Slovenia)

That we must fight daily for the perseverance of art in all its forms, it’s very worrying how we’re losing sometimes audiences to activities such as television, social networks, it’s important to keep quality of arts and to educate from a young age. (Josetxu Obregón, Spain)

Listen to the harmony of the universe and act according to it! (Boris Šinigoj, Slovenia)