We are delighted to announce a new project, the Surtierra Touring Project, which WemsFest will be delivering locally in collaboration with London-based Anglo-Chilean band Quimantu in the first half of 2025!

The Surtierra Touring Project is a large-scale project, run by Quimantu and Musiko Musika (an artist-led music education and cultural organisation). The project will work with five community choirs to tour performances of Mauricio Venegas-Astorga’s Misa de los Mineros (Miners’ Mass), in Hampshire, West Sussex, and Dorset, culminating with two large-scale performances in London as part of Refugee Week in June 2025, in which all singers/choirs that have been involved in the project will be invited to perform together.

As a Community Interest Company, WemsFest has a mandate to benefit the local community. We know that music has a powerful ability to bring people together. With the Surtierra Touring Project, as with our recent Maroon Town Black History Month School Workshops, we hope to take this a step further: to harness the power of music to promote community integration, anti-racism, the understanding of history, and the welcoming of those from other cultures, including refugees who are now living locally. The composer of the Misa de los Mineros, Mauricio Venegas-Astorga, is himself a refugee, having escaped the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile as a young man, arriving in the UK in 1977 where he has since made a home and built his career.

Locally for WemsFest, this project has involved the creation of a 65-person-strong collaborative community choir, bringing together locals from all walks of life, as well as deliberately inviting refugees who live locally. We have two brilliant choir leaders, Emily Barden and Laura Blake, who will lead our choir. The WemsFest Choir will form to learn, rehearse, and perform the Misa de los Mineros, as well as other pieces chosen by the choir. The choir will perform three local performances of the Misa de los Mineros in Spring 2025, in Chichester (Sat 5th April at St Paul's Church), Leigh Park/Havant (Fri 9th May at Park Community School), and Portsmouth (Sat 14th June at Portsmouth Cathedral). The choir will then travel to London for a special performance at St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden, in a grand finale for the project on Fri 20th June 2025. For some performances, the WemsFest choir will be joined by similar collaborative community choirs from Andover, Southampton, and Dorset.

This project is being supported by a generous grant from Arts Council England, but we are needing to support the project with local fundraising – we have a target of raising £15,000 locally. This money will be used to deliver our arm of the project – paying for the hire of rehearsal spaces and performance venues, paying for the choir leaders who will teach us the piece, paying for the choir’s transportation to and from London for the Finale Performance, etc. We also hope to raise enough money to be able to pay for transportation costs to and from rehearsals, for choir members from the refugee/asylum-seeking community. Childcare may also need to be provided at rehearsals; we would like to be able to hire a qualified childminder to provide this service, to remove as many barriers to participation as possible.

We would also like to be able to offer complimentary tickets to members of the refugee/asylum-seeking community in Chichester / Leigh Park and Havant / Portsmouth.

If you are interested to donate or to help us raise funds to deliver the Surtierra Touring Project, we’d be absolutely chuffed! Please get in touch with Mark Ringwood at adwemsfest@gmail.com