Uhuru Republic: "Welcome to Uhuru Republic"
Uhuru Republic is a collective of Italian and African artists, born thanks to the support of Roberto Mengoni and the Italian embassy in Dar Es Salaam that pushed the artists Giulietta Passera (voice, Mangaboo, The Sweet Life Society, Istituto Italiano di Cumbia, Sonoristan), FiloQ (electronics, Istituto Italiano di Cumbia, Magellano) and Raffaele Rebaudengo (viola, Gnu Quartet) to undertake a journey to Tanzania and to give life to a music and visual arts project unique of its kind: connecting two apparently distant cultures such as African and Italian through music and visual arts. A strong cohesion was thus created between the collective and the local artists, who contributed to the creation of the album and participated in a tour that began in Tanzania in 2018 and continued in 2019 and 2020 also in Italy and Kenya.
After having composed a series of beats and after having sent them to the African musicians involved, we left for Tanzania. It was an incredible job: we met dozens of artists, spokespersons of traditions as far as they are close.
The visual artists Nicola Alessandrini and Lisa Gelli, engaged, among other things, for years in the production of urban works and authors of the mural series "Specie Migranti", which became the cover of Uhuru Republic’s first single, developed the visual imagery of the project following the Italian team in Tanzania in August 2019.
The two artists, together with the serigraph Filippo Basile from PressPress collective, an artisan art printing laboratory in Milan, carried out an artistic residency at the Nafasi Art Space in Dar Es Salaam with the Tanzanian artists Safina Kimbokota, Dismas Leonard, Ahmed " Medy ”Maubaka, Walter Simbo and Liberatha Alibalio, in which, through shared drawing and analog screen printing sessions, they extended the fusion of intercultural languages, in a bi-univocal and horizontal way, to the world of visual arts.
Result of the residency was the creation of a work in live painting, an art exhibition, but above all the collection of graphic material that composed the visual imagery of Uhuru Republic project.
The term Uhuru, which gives its name to the project, indicates the top of Kilimanjaro but it also means, in Swahili (the national language of Tanzania), freedom and knowledge: the pivotal manifesto of the 11 tracks composing the collective’s first album Welcome to Uhuru Republic link Turin, Genoa, Dar Es Salaam, Zanzibar and Nairobi reinterpreting and re-reading the traditional music of East Africa through the codes of contemporary electronics.
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