Arnold de Boer “Zea” ontvangt op 29 juni in Italië de Ostana Music Prize op het Premio Ostana festival voor zijn in 2021 verschenen Friestalige album Witst noch dat d’r neat wie, een coproductie van ZEA met Explore the North, De Popfabryk en Subroutine Records.
Het festival rond de “Ostana Prize: Writings in Mother Tongues” is een door UNESCO gesteund evenement waar minderheidstalen van over de hele wereld centraal staan. Gefeliciteerd, Arnold!
De Ostana-prijs is een literatuur-, vertaal-, muziek- en filmprijs gewijd aan alle moedertalen van de wereld, ongeacht hun aantal sprekers of de grootte van hun territorium. De vijftiende editie van het festival vindt plaats van 28 tot en met 30 juni in het dorpje Ostana in de Po vallei, provincie Cuneo in Italië. De jury schreef het volgende over het album en werk van ZEA:
As per tradition, the Ostana Prize dedicates a section to musical composition, and the 2024 edition has the opportunity to welcome an exceptional artist: Arnold De Boer, aka “Zea”, singer and guitarist since 2009 of the legendary Dutch underground band The Ex. In 2011, Arnold De Boer’s life was turned upside down by a tragedy: the death of his mother, at a very young age, from cancer. In a moment of great pain, the inspiration to return to writing came in the language that he had always shared with her, his mother tongue in the literal sense of the term, and so he began to write texts in Frisian. First in 2017 and then in 2021, he released two entire albums in Frisian which were very well received internationally.
His compositions in the Frisian language are personal, intimate and direct, his lyrics are poetic; and language plays an absolutely central role: language as a source, as a wall, as a weapon, as time, as history, language as a musical form. For this reason De Boer works both on his own texts and on compositions by other Frisian writers, poets and songwriters. Over the last twenty years, Arnold De Boer has performed in more than forty countries on all continents and it is remarkable that wherever he goes, he now sings mostly in Frisian. For his artistic, linguistic and cultural activism, he founded a record label with which he promotes his work of spreading Frisian but also music and languages from all over the world. The Ostana Prize wants to recognise his use of his native language in music, which is expressed in a great attention to contemporaneity, sensitive to history, with an intelligent and communicative style. He is recognised for his ability to be cross-cutting, his praise of multilingualism, his awareness that each language expresses something unique and that this uniqueness, within the multitude, must be preserved, innovated, vitalised, because, as Arnold says, “growing up speaking more than one language is an antidote against mental rigidity.”
On Saturday 29 June at 21h he will have a conversation with Flavio Giacchero; followed by an Evening “en convivéncia” with the musicians-artists of the Ostana Prize.