Photo: Archivio Meeting

Meeting 2021: The voices of the I

“The Rimini Meeting wants to encounter those who perceive life in this way – with all its disproportion and need - because we also perceive that lack and would like to know more about what we are looking for.” From "Quotidiano Meeting".
Guadalupe Arbona Abascal

The crisis of our time is undoubtedly a circumstance that has shattered so many certainties and things into a thousand pieces, which we thought would endure forever. So, what is happening? This is what we ask ourselves. Questions arise little by little, as we listen to the women and men of our time who have the courage to break the silence. Where is our world going? Why illness? And death? From where do we start again? How should we look at the wounds we see in us and around us? What about this sadness? Who are we?

These questions, which until recently we were ashamed to ask ourselves in public – and indeed that we hid so as not to let our weaknesses show – can now be heard all around us: they are asked by rappers, influencers, characters from TV series. The Rimini Meeting is not afraid of these questions, on the contrary, it perceives them as its own. Thus, it offers them to Italian society, and to the entire world, as the most precious thing needed for a new beginning. The Meeting vibrates with these whispered, sung or shouted questions; they are the dramatic and intelligent emotions that constitute the human being, that is, the most intimate and true vibrations of the self. How can we fail to hear Pasolini's prophetic question: "Something is always missing; in everything I perceive, there is always a void" (from the exhibition "Io, P.P. Pasolini"). Or that nostalgia Jules feels in her life, broken into pieces, for a mother's love (from the exhibition "A Question That Burns"). How can we not embrace Jewish Edith Bruck's question – after all her suffering at Auschwitz – "Who allowed me not to hate?" (from the series "The Crack and the Light"). And Lady Gaga's question ignites us inside: "Tell me somethin’, girl, are you happy in this modern world? Or do you need more? Is there somethin’ else you're searching for?"

The Rimini Meeting wants to encounter those who perceive life in this way – with all its disproportion and need - because we also perceive that lack and would like to know more about what we are looking for.
Let me go one step further: I – a Spaniard, who has been coming to the Meeting for 30 years, initially as a young girl, driving seventeen hours to get there – was moved by an attraction, and again by the gratuitous, challenging and dramatic affection that I perceived within my experience of the Meeting. Since then, every year –particularly this year – I am offered the opportunity to see whether the Christian experience, from which the Meeting was born, offers me its unique claim: to embrace my questions. As a character from the TV series West World, quoted in the exhibition "A Burning Question," says, which I hope to convey through the meetings, exhibitions, performances, and the gratuitous work of so many people, "You are the first real thing that has happened to me in a long time." I have been waiting for this for a long time, and am still waiting for it now with my companions.