Music is a free representation of ideas, traditions and feelings of individuals and societies. It expresses the hopes and desires of musicians, their joys and sorrows, their cultural identity. And these expressions may cause conflicts with people in power. The visions of the musicians may plainly not be popular or are far from the mainstream of thinking of a government or a group with vested interests. Because of this, there are people all over the world who feel threatened only because they practise a free exchange of ideas. Some people will use any means to stop them. As Orson Welles has said: “If freedom means anything it is the right to speak to those who don’t want to listen.”
The censorship of music has been and is executed by states, regions, educational systems, families, conquerors and pressure groups. In most cases this is a violation of the international human rights conventions.
In our case, in our very house, there are a lot of artists who have experienced censorship, have had their concerts stopped, been denied justice, been banned... We can refer to Su Ta Gar, Soziedad Alcoholica, Fermín Muguruza, Berri Txarrak, Lehiotikan, the film director Julio Medem for his documentary film “La Pelota Vasca: La Piel contra la Piedra”, Negu Kortatu por su tema “Sarri, Sarri”... This listing is not concluded and the list grows from day to day.
Because of all this we organized a festival as a celebration of all the artists that for some reason, at some time, in some country... have been censored. Our relation to Freemuse is one of sincere respect and support in all the activities it undertakes to reach its goals: to make the problems caused by censorship of music known and to fight for the rights of all people to express themselves. This is also the reason why we embarked on organizing our Zentsuraren aurkako jaialdia / Festival contra la censura / Festival against censorship in Gernika.
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