Creative Dissonances: Sahba Aminikia @CCA

Organized by Taro Hattori, Senior Adjunct, Individualized Studies Program

On Monday, November 15, 2021, Sahba Aminikia, an Iranian-American contemporary music composer, artistic director, performer, and educator discussed how his life-experiences of personal, cultural, and political conflicts are transformed into his work and how music in general helps us live through challenging times. The talk is part of a course “Dissonance - Music and Conflict,” one of the Upper Division Interdisciplinary Studio courses at California College of the Arts, which helps students incorporate our experiences of conflicts in our creative making practices learning from how music transcends borders and unites us regardless of the conflicts that exist. Born in post-revolutionary wartime in Iran, Sahba Aminikia was raised during a newly configured democracy that evolved from mass-executions, war, and violence into a society that—through the use of the internet and technology—challenges the current political and social infrastructure. He has been trained in musical composition under Iranian pianists Nikan Milani, Safa Shahidi, and Mehran Rouhani. He later relocated to Russia and studied at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory under Boris Ivanovich Tishchenko. His musical compositions have been widely performed around the world by contemporary classical ensembles, orchestras, and bands including Kronos, International Contemporary Ensemble, Carnegie Hall Ensemble Connect, San Francisco Conservatory of Music New Music Ensemble. Aminikia is the founder and the artistic director of Flying Carpet Festival, a performing arts festival for children in war zones. This event was funded by an endowment gift to support The Deborah and Kenneth Novack Creative Citizens Series at CCA, an annual series of public programs focused on creative activism. The 2021–2022 Creative Citizens Series will focus on four pillars of the Communal Flower, a model for understanding communality in the ancient philosophy and daily practice of various Indigenous nations in southern Mexico: land, communal responsibility, assembly and joy. This event explored joy.

Artists Wow Children In Turkey With Lively Shows

In its third edition, the Flying Carpet Festival drew smiles on the faces of children from impoverished communities in southeast Turkey. The festival is a visual and musical spectacle performed by artists from around the world.

With circus performances including acrobatics, juggling and stilt walking, organizers of the Flying Carpet Festival in Turkey always come prepared to entertain. In a recent event in the southeastern city of Mardin, performers regaled the children with a show featuring a giant puppet, followed by a music performance and tales told by a storyteller, among other segments. The festival is organized by a volunteer-based collective of artists who perform for vulnerable and refugee children in southeast Turkey, at the border with Syria. Among the performers was 21-year-old Mahmoud al-Faris, who was beside himself with happiness because he gets to teach at the circus school years after arriving to Turkey as a refugee. In total, the festival this year has reached more than 6,000 children from Syrian, Kurdish and Turkish backgrounds. "We mostly target children who are in need of beauty and come from the most deserved communities," says festival founder Sahba Aminikia. "There is lack of access in these communities to any form of actual culture and artistic activity," he adds. So Aminikia, an Iranian-American music composer and pianist himself, rolls up his sleeves and starts to entertain the children, playing the piano and singing with them. This year alone, he has performed alongside artists from across the world including American, Italian, French, Armenian, Iraqi, Turkish, Iranian and Venezuelan artists. Some of the festival's shows in certain villages were cancelled this year because of COVID-19 restrictions. The shows have had to relocate to schools, bringing performances to eight schools and two neighborhoods. The festival is a collaboration with the Mardin-based Sirkhane social circus school, which helps to restore confidence in refugee youth. In addition to receiving private donations, the festival gets funding from Germany's BMZ and the Welthungerhilfe.

S.F. Composer Revives Festival Bringing Music and Circus Arts to Displaced Children in Turkey

Andrew Gilbert on October 1, 2021

The brainchild of San Francisco composer Sahba Aminikia, the festival brings music and circus arts to a southeastern region of Turkey crowded with families displaced by war and repression in nearby Syria, Iraq and Turkey’s decades-long campaign against its own Kurdish separatists. While COVID-19 forced Aminikia to cancel last year’s activities, Flying Carpet is set for liftoff again Friday, Oct. 1, as a slimmed-down movable production presenting workshops, classes and performances through Oct. 10, in cities and villages around the Mardin region.

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