Wings & Roots

Shaping identity between cultures

In 2016, Theresa May proclaimed, “If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.” Yet, according to the United Nations, in 2019 worldwide 272 million people are international migrants. Many of them have settled permanently in their host countries. Others plan to return, one day. All of them, and many more people, live and work in-between cultures.

The documentary-concert Wings & Roots explores the implications of existing in between worlds and cultures. The work focuses on Shishani Vranckx, John Farah, Bodek Janke, and Andrea Voets: four musicians that carry twelve countries within them. The transcultural psychiatrist Glenn Helberg helps them to piece it all together: all these different realities that make up the puzzle of their identity. 

The filmed conversations with the musicians resonate through the musician’s live-music on stage. Together with the audience, they shape a new sense of belonging: one that embraces and celebrates the multi-layered complexity of who we are.

Wings & Roots is a documentary-concert by Andrea Voets. Stay up to date on her musical journalism on this Facebook page.

About Andrea Voets, Resonate Productions

Resonate Productions is the world’s only organisation for musical journalism. They combine music and original journalism into documentary-concerts and podcasts about emotional blind spots in society. By putting these in a musical context, space is made to rediscover these feelings. Andrea Voets is their artistic director.

Music is a universal force that helps to unlock, channel and express our emotions. By carefully combining honest words and confronting facts with music, we can build the connection to our deeper, inner lives that the news fails to touch.

They make our musical journalism about emotional blind spots. These are fundamental feelings that are present in many of us, but we lack the words to make sense of what we’re experiencing.

After identifying a blind spot, they embark on a long road of research, conversations and creation. They bring the blind spots to the surface, analyse them and offer ways out of the problems they create: most of all, in meaningful contact with ourselves and with others.

www.resonate-productions.com