Taobuk 2024

June 20 to 24, 2024 Teatro Antico and other places in Taormina

Identity is this year’s motto and challenge of Taobuk 2024 the festival, which for years has been dedicated to the rich world of books, philosophy, science and art.

The 2024 Taobuk Award for Literary Excellence, during the gala evening at the Ancient Theatre on 22 June, will be given to Nobel Prize for Literature 2023 winner Jon Fosse, to US writer Jonathan Safran Foer and to the French storyteller, playwright and film scriptwriter Yasmina Reza. The Taobuk Award for Visual Arts will instead go to the Serbian artist and performer Marina Abramovic.

And again at the Ancient Theatre of Taormina on 23 June at 9 pm, Alessandro Baricco will present his new play, “Tucidide” of which he is author and director. Baricco will be on stage as narrator, flanked by actresses Stefania Rocca and Valeria Solarino and accompanied by the 100 Cellos, a cellist ensemble founded and directed by Enrico Melozzi and Giovanni Sollima, who also composed the original music for the occasion.

Identity is a fundamental theme in the work of Jon Fosse, who has turned literature into a tool for saying the unspeakable, investigating the meaning of existence in Melancholia and in the world-book Settologia and following a personal journey of identity that, in 2012, saw him convert to Catholicism.

But it is also a theme dear to Jonathan Safran Foer who, in Ogni cosa è illuminata, revealed to the reader a recherche of his own roots, along a biographical path in which pain and love, past and present continually intersect.

Just as sensitively, Yasmina Reza plumbed identity, exploring the condition humaine without censorship in Happy the Happy and The God of Massacre, on which Roman Polański’s film Carnage was based.

And there are countless connections with this year’s theme also in Marina Abramovic’s performing art, constantly striving to identify the meaning of identity in the capacity and willingness to rely on one another, in a continuous rediscovery of the self as a reflection of the other. Just think of the famous performances Rest Energy, Imponderabilia, The artist is present or Rhythm 0.