Vestments

Vestments

by Ensemble at the Confines of Liminality

Vestments is the inaugural concert of the new music and multimedia collective Ensemble at the Confines of Liminality (ECL).

The main concept behind 'Vestments' has roots in Abrahamic religions and the trauma propagated by systemic ostracization of minority groups; it draws from the personal experience of members of the collective. At the same time, it is meant to serve as a critique aimed to deconstruct the public perception of what it means to be religious while advocating for human rights. The concert is presented as a multi-sensorial experience involving music, visual arts and scents. The program is structurally indebted to religious liturgies, alternating with settings of poems by Anne Sexton, in an attempt to understand the very nature of faith and evil.

ECL was born through the partnership of Italian composer Antonio Daprile and Cypriot cellist Symeon Seraphim as a musical collective with modular forces that endeavours to portray multifaceted realities through multi-media concept concerts.

The term 'liminality' is etymologically derived from 'limen', the latin word for 'threshold', but in its modern definition, liminality is a stage of transition; a limbo. Liminal spaces are places of transience that can be experienced in two broad manifestations: -Physical spaces, where people are not meant to dwell for longer than necessary, where interactions are mundane and unimportant; -Stages of life, which are rarely shared amongst people, and can be developmental (e.g.: one's first love) or physiological (e.g.: puberty).

Although people's lives vastly diverge from eachother, most people will experience a certain number of liminal spaces of both categories in a roughly similar manner.

In a limited number of cases, some are doomed to eternity in a liminal space.