Statement on our curatorial policy
Dear community,
The atrocities in Israel-Palestine concern and sadden us both personally and collectively. We do not have the right answer for the geo-political conflicts of our time. We strongly appeal to stop the killings of thousands of civilians in this war, and we urge our governments to push forward policies for the safety of every human life.
The choice to refrain from discussing these topics on social media was deliberate, because of well-known, well-researched, and empirically proven reasons. We have been reading the same literature and learning from the same intellectuals, following the same news, listening closely to the same political leaders, some of us walked together on the same streets for the same causes. We are constantly learning from conversations with members of our community and other curators in similar spaces.
We ask you to contextualize our work at jazzhane and we invite you to pay attention to nuances regarding the arts’ and artists’ role in our society. As an organization, we strongly believe in openness and transparency, and we highly emphasize dialogue. The war in Israel-Palestine bears challenges that affect our curatorial practices within the field of arts and music, and thus our roles in a global society.
We place great value on the artistic curation of our cultural program. The decisions for our productions, collaborations, and shows are made on artistic merits in collaboration with our co-producers (venues) and musicians (Swiss and international).
Trying our best to represent a diverse (gender, ethnicity, culture, opinion, etc.) group of artists on stage, we understand this is not always possible due to structural limitations. The regions we and some of our artists (partly) come from are home to several conflicts and turbulences which are a source of suffering for many of us and we will always invite those, who contribute to a peaceful world.
We will continue our policy in the future because we strongly believe that music can tell our stories of suffering, love, happiness, migration, and oppression beyond nation-based borders. This is at the very core of jazzhane and we are proud to have created spaces for members of our community to feel they belong.
When we invite artists, we always make sure to include clauses of discrimination in our contracts: we have the right to cancel shows without further obligation in case of any discriminatory statements/behavior (online and offline) of the artists (homophobia, sexism, racism, ableism, etc.), the same is true for all partners we work with. We ask our partners to be aware of their role and notoriety, which brings with it a certain responsibility. We do our research as best as we can, given the limits (time, resources, etc.) we have, and discuss each artist together with our co-producers.
We understand diversity to include pluralist perspectives and opinions. We are sure that we have mutual opinions on certain current topics. Given the complexity of the issues, our personal opinions might coincide on some levels, while they might slightly differ or sometimes even clash on other topics. We might perfectly share the very same values and worldview but have different opinions on how to achieve our shared goals.
Believing this is a necessity to keep the dialogue alive and the arts free, we hope you understand our position.
Your jazzhane team
