This worksheet is a “reliquiary” from the Radicate ArtResidency, conducted by the Laboratorio Teatrale Residui Teatro. Originally conceived as the closing song for the performance Radicate, Alyadi did not remain confined to the “falling of the curtain.” During the days of the residency, it was transformed into a mantra learned by everyone – from our hosts at Le Fattizze to anyone who participated in the Radicate experience in any capacity. Alyadi was a constant vibration that accompanied every gesture, every rehearsal, and every reflection, weaving an invisible thread between the plight of the Salento olive trees and the sorrow of Palestine.

As Viviana writes in her intense reflections within our logbook between one thought and another, the olive tree has no hurry: it is a tree that measures time not in seasons, but in generations. Those who plant an olive tree performs an act of faith; they do not do it for themselves, but for their children’s children. This is precisely the ancestral bond we evoked in Radicate. That crumpled sheet of paper in the Campo reminds us that the work of art is like that of the olive tree: it requires care, respect, and the patience of those who know that roots, even when they seem broken, continue to seek life beneath the earth.

But today, that bond is under attack.

In Salento, the “Giants” are bent by a blight that withers them, turning cathedrals of leaves into silver skeletons. In Palestine, the tragedy takes on the shape of human violence: over 800,000 olive trees have been uprooted since 1967 (according to estimates from an article shared by Viviana), destroyed to sever the identity of a people. Just as in our own countryside, the felling of a tree is not merely ecological damage; it is, as old Salem says, “cutting the tongue” of a culture, preventing a grandfather from explaining to his grandchildren “who they are.”

It is precisely within this shared – though very different- wound that Alyadi takes root as a song of the Mediterranean Peoples. If the Palestinian land, as Mahmoud Darwish suggests, speaks with the tongue of the olive tree, then we speak a common language; Alyadi is an attempt to give voice to that language when it becomes a cry.

Using this song as a mantra during the residency meant never forgetting the artist’s responsibility: the duty to remain in a state of listening. We sang among the blanched olives of the Campo – a place that is indeed a dimension of mourning, but also one of Resistance.

It is the oil that anoints the bread and the newborn; it is the light that resists the darkness of bulldozers and chainsaws. It is the gesture of the farmers in Yanun who return to plant new saplings, knowing they might not see them grow, but knowing that “they will know we were here”.

The performance Radicate ends with this song, but its echo remains suspended in the air long after the last note has faded. Alyadi thus becomes a secular prayer for peace, a sonic bridge connecting Palestine to the plains of Salento.

Because if the oil of the olive tree risks becoming “tears”, music and memory have the task of transforming those tears into new lifeblood. To keep planting. To keep staying. To keep singing.

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