In the middle of Europe is a country ruled by a dictatorship. Week after week people in Belarus take to the streets to demonstrate peacefully for freedom. They have voted out the dictator Lukashenka and his administration in order to create a democratic, open country. But he refuses to give way, acting relentlessly, cynically and with growing cruelty against the Belarusian people. The leaders of the resistance are constantly threatened, living under an ever present reality of being put behind bars while the Belarusians see and feel their struggle towards freedom and change becoming ever more difficult and distant.

With the project ECHOES – VOICES FROM BELARUS the resistance and the will for change of the people in Belarus is given a reverberation space, a place to echo and evolve. The festival ECLAT invites and creates a platform for the collaboration between Belarusian and international artists to produce short artistic statements which reflect the current situation in Belarus and, through artistic means, give these voices the possibility to be heard in Europe and worldwide.

During the next months our wish is to continuously infect the digital world with these statements and thus regularly provide a virtual stage for the voices from Belarus. At the festival ECLAT in Stuttgart, all pieces are to be performed or presented in a large performance installation at the beginning of February 2021. In this way, a great narrative is to be created which will bring us closer to the situation in Belarus and give the people of Belarus the certainty that we share their concerns.

Works by Ales Pushkin, Alexander Adamov, Alexandra Filonenko, Alexandra Kononchenko, Andreas Frank, Anton Baton, Antonina Slobodchikova, Carola Bauckholt, Christoph Ogiermann, Clemens K. Thomas, Ekaterina Zhyniarouskaya, Gleb Kowalski, Gareth Davis, Grigory Horoneko, Hannes Seidl, Huihui Cheng, Igor Shugaleev, Julia Mihály, Lesia Pcholka, Malte Giesen, Marina Naprushkina, Maximilian Marcoll, Mihal Gulin, Nadya Sayapina, Oscar Bianchi, Pony Says, Raed Yassin, Sara Glojnarić, Sergej Newski, Uladzimir Hramovich, Vasilisa Palianina, Zhanna Gladko.

The project is dedicated to Maria Kalesnikava, who has been part of our team for the festival ECLAT and for Musik der Jahrhunderte since 2018 and has been imprisoned in Minsk since September 2020.

The project is funded in the impulse program "Art despite distance"
of the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg