Errobiko Supra

The feast for the thirtieth anniversary of Errobiko Festibala will be like a sun made of laid tables, set between the mountains and the inner shores of worlds, at the heart of our schooner-big top. A banquet like a ship, to cross the night together : we invite our friends, ferrymen, dreamers, from the gorges of Atekagaitz, where the river still keeps something of the torrent, to sail towards those archipelagos we have loved for three decades. We learned from the Georgians that bread and wine are not enough; that one must also carry the spoken word standing tall, raise glasses for those who were here before us, for those who will come after us, for the dead, for the living, for the languages still trembling in the throats of unconquered peoples. Then the supra will come, offered to the moon that lights our nights. Thirty toasts for thirty editions. Thirty ways of saying thank you to what binds us. Thirty ways of making community, of tying scattered voices back together, of celebrating what still resists erasure, and of testing love through song.
For at the heart of the table, songs will rise like distant lands that suddenly recognize one another as sisters. And we will tremble as we listen:
The Georgian polyphonies, opening the fissures of the earliest ages.
The Bulgarian voices, calling in waves to the vultures of the Itsusi cliffs.
The Basque songs, reminding us that every language resisting oblivion enlarges humanity.
The wood of the txalaparta will speak, a cavalcade of fire and water, with that way fallen trees have of continuing, despite everything, to beat the heart of the world. Risa Nagahama’s cuisine will come as an offering, attentive to the stories of souls and places as much as to delicate flavours: in the sharing, a precise gesture, a memory of taste placed in the hollow of the hand. Clara Claus’s visual arts will give the table its sensitive forms: because objects inhabited by hands and by use know how to welcome, know how to transmit. That evening will not be only about celebrating an anniversary. It will be about holding fast to the fragile promise of a hospitable land where cultures do not close in on themselves, but meet on equal footing. About believing in relation rather than borders, in the creolization of imaginaries rather than in the walls and fortresses of empires. In peace — not as an empty promise proclaimed in the speeches of warmongers, but as a practice of the table, of song, of listening, and of sharing.
We will forget neither the crushed peoples and languages, nor the memories trampled by colonizations. We will not forget all those voices that imperialisms would like to silence. For every song saved by memory or rising from rooted creation, every poem passed down or invented, every language spoken despite oppression, is already a victory against erasure, against the disappearance of species and cultures.
Then we will eat.
We will sing.
We will raise our glasses.
And on all those face-hearts lit by the flickering light, perhaps we will read this: that a festival can sometimes become a country.