Shulùq Ensemble

Born in 2014 from the encounter of three musicians from different worlds — classical European, Arab-North African, baroque and jazz — the Shulùq Ensemble takes its name from the Maghrebian word for the "Scirocco", the south wind that has carried cultures, languages and peoples across the Mediterranean for centuries. The ensemble's album, "The Dream of Ibn Hamdis" (VisageMusic, Italy, 2022), is built around the elegiac poetry of Ibn Hamdis (1056-1133) — the Arab-Sicilian poet who, exiled after the Norman invasion of Sicily, spent his life dreaming of the sea that separated him from his homeland. His verses, oscillating between longing and beauty, loss and transcendence, form the poetic soul of a musical journey spanning Algerian modes, Sicilian folk melodies, Mediterranean rhythms and contemporary chamber music. Nine pieces. Fifty minutes. One sea. "The Dream of Ibn Hamdis" is, above all, the evidence of a "sea between the lands" — the Mediterranean as cultural crossroads, fluid sequence of civilisations, utopia of historical encounters, and metaphor for communication. Against the dark speculations of identity, it asserts itself as a metaphor for memory, a cartography of inclusion, a moving space where images flow one after another in a shared body of values — that Mediterranean voice which daily pays the price of an anti-historical hecatomb. In the tradition of Ibn Hamdis himself — whose elegiac verse, after the Norman invasion, reached toward Tunisia, Algeria and al-Andalus, the extreme western borders of the Arab world in the 12th century — this album is the synthesis of a mystical experience that reverberates through the minds and souls of post-global-village travelers. Gazing from any window of the "Mare Nostrum", one hears at once the joyful melodies of Punic fishermen, the rumbling of amphoras, the saline breeze of the desert wind, the stars read by Hypatia — from Noto to Tunis, from Béjaïa to Mallorca. It is the divine combination of legends and peoples, of stars and sailors, of art and peace, of algebraic and musical codes. And it is the symbol of a noble demand: hands off the unique Mediterranean. With the strings and voice of Salim Dada, the winds of Calogero Giallanza and the percussions of Andrea Piccioni, the Shulùq Ensemble has brought this music to stages across Italy, Algeria, Lebanon, Indonesia, ... In May 2022, the ensemble performed at the Quirinale Palace in Rome before the Presidents of Italy and Algeria — a moment that sealed, in music, the depth of a shared Mediterranean history.