with Brel Froebe, Cascadia Deaf Nation, Dirar Kalash, and Samara Hayley Steele
Social project, serial walk, durational contemplation, public exhibition-intervention based in Nooksack River watershed, unceded Lhaq'temish (Lummi) and Noxwsʼáʔaq (Nooksack) territories.
2019 – ongoing
Independently produced with support from Square One Foundation and Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts.
بيان الصعود إلى السماء Flight Manifesto is a social artwork directed by Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman in long-distance collaboration with Palestinian sound artist Dirar Kalash and a growing organizing collective of co-authors in Whatcom County that includes educator and community organizer Brel Froebe, media artist, researcher and activist Samara Hayley Steele, and Cascadia Deaf Nation, a social enterprise led by and for BIPOCD (Black Indigenous People of Color Deaf) in the Pacific Northwest. While the project is multi-layered and long-term, its core contribution is a silent walk in three parts over several months along the Nooksack River: a visceral confrontation with foundational architectures and practices of settler-colonization as an ongoing, transnational, and imperial process with definite beginnings in Whatcom County (US).
بيان الصعود إلى السماء Flight Manifesto means to curate and collectivize everyday acts of walking and listening in Whatcom County as a potential site for what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (in an Anishinaabe context) calls “flight to escape colonial reality… [into] another present.” For white settlers, settlers of color, black, and displaced persons in Whatcom County, anti-colonial flight requires encountering the territory around us directly, in its breadth and detail, as colonized Lhaq’temish (Lummi) and Noxwsʼáʔaq (Nooksack) worlds. At the same time, such sites of flight are haunted by different populations’ memories and conditions of flight: of abrupt departure; of deportation; of statelessness; of fugitivity; of houselessness; of dispossession; of the refugee-become-settler; of mob violence and State siege; of impossible, impassable, or improbable ascent; and of nonhuman witness. Flight is a space where core struggles, crimes, and paradoxes of populations under settler-colonialism approximate and converge.
It is there that in collectively organizing, enacting, documenting, and representing the Nooksack River walks, we intentionally construct social structures for responsible settler participation and accountability in decolonial struggle in Whatcom County. بيان الصعود إلى السماء Flight Manifesto slowly situates itself into proximity with and between Lhaq’temish and Noxwsʼáʔaq cultural-ecological resurgence work, BIPOCD listening practices and organized struggle, and Kalash’s concurrent compositional labor in the (uniquely) intact and unappropriated ruins of لفتا Lifta, a Palestinian village in West Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed 1947-48, under imminent threat of demolition and development
— Introducing بيان الصعود إلى السماء Flight Manifesto. Online. January 8, 2022.
This meeting will include an introduction to the project and a collective planning and authoring session. Facilitated by Brel Froebe, Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman and Samara Hayeley Steele.
— Confronting George E. Pickett in Space. 24th MLK Human Rights Conference: An Inescapable Network of Mutuality: Creative Extremism for the Cause of Justice, Whatcom Human Rights Task Force, Online. January 15, 2022.
This presentation introduces two art collectives working to confront the spatial traces of the two earliest US military institutions in the City of Bellingham, both built to solidify the settler-colonization of Lhaq’temish (Lummi) and Noxwsʼáʔaq (Nooksack) territory: Fort Bellingham and the supposed house of the former’s captain, George E. Pickett, known as the George E. Pickett Memorial Home. Where the Fort is absent, now a neighborhood just south of the mouth of the Nooksack River and Lummi Nation, the Pickett Memorial is a historically contested site, most recently in the wake of Charlottesville and the global movement to tear down or otherwise intervene in public symbols of colonizers and enslavers. Pickett happened to be both: of an elite Virginia enslaving family, the first military overseer of settler-colonization here, and a Confederate General. And yet, there is no doubt that all of us live in the wake and perpetuation of the living system—its narratives, institutions, capital, empire—that this figure was and remains a significant tool of. Panelists include: Josh Cerretti, Sophie McMahon, Hadley Hudson, and Samara Hayley Steele. Moderated by Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman.
— Anti-Colonial Listening. Online. February 5, 2022.
This meeting will be required for anyone who wishes to participate in the first walk. The meeting will be split into two parts. In the first hour, Dirar Kalash will lead a workshop on anti-colonial listening. During this workshop, we will prioritize giving space for members of Cascadia Deaf Nation to dialogue with Dirar’s teachings. The intention is for all of us to integrate what arises between Dirar and CDN and to think about listening in a radical and political sense, taking these teachings with us into the first silent walk to the mouth of the Nooksack River. The second hour of the meeting will be dedicated to collectively planning and authoring the first walk. Facilitated by Brel Froebe, Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman, and Samara Hayley Steele.
— Anti-Colonial Listening II. TBD
— The first walk will take place on 2/27. We will silently walk from our homes converging together on Squalicum Beach at the end of Roeder Avenue. Then we’ll walk north together along the shoreline to the mouth of the Nooksack River, passing the site of Fort Bellingham, wading through a shallow channel of the delta until emerging in the village of Marietta on Marine Drive.
— The second walk is TBD.
— The third walk is TBD.
Brel Froebe (he/they) is of Ashkenazi Jewish and German descent, and is an educator and community organizer living in the occupied Lummi and Nooksack territory of so-called “Whatcom County.” Brel grew up along the Middle Fork Nooksack River, and is passionate about doing what he can to protect the surrounding forests and watersheds. He received an MA in Urban Education and Social Justice at the University Of San Francisco, and has spent the past decade facilitating youth empowerment through restorative justice, critical pedagogy, art, and outdoor education. Brel is also active in campaigns to decriminalize homelessness and to start the Stewart Mountain Community Forest. Brel is the media and communications coordinator for the Center for Responsible Forestry, an organization that is fighting to protect near-old growth “legacy” forests from being clearcut, as well as promoting forest management policies that prioritize biodiversity, watershed health, and climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Multi-instrumentalist and composer Dirar Kalash creates live performances that combine text, sound, image, video and movement. Primary instruments are piano, oud, saxophone and electronics. Regularly using open source software in the field of real time audio, video and image processing, his work is based on everyday life as a phenomenon, which is then subjected to live processing, composition and decomposition. His performative and compositional approach challenges the binary logic of new/old and west/east oppositions as tools of cultural hegemony. He holds a Masters in Sonology from the Institute of Sonology, Royal Conservatory of The Hague and has toured his work throughout Europe and the Arab world. Born in Haifa, Kalash currently works and lives in Palestine.
Samara Hayley Steele (she/they) is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at UC Davis and they hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University. Their ancestry includes Danish and English settlers, African survivors of kidnapping, and Indigenous people of this continent. She is a former foster kid, and is not tribally-affiliated. Their present research explores narrative care in times of racial capital, gendered empire, and colonial ecocide. They have presented their scholarship critically exploring gender, race, political economy, games, code, and data at numerous academic gatherings and events including invited presentations at Lewis & Clark College, UC Berkeley, the European University at St. Petersburg, and the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force conference named in honor of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She is a Project Director at the UC Davis ModLab, where from 2019-22 she led two research teams in developing inclusive game-based curriculum for college students that blends STEM, the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Her artistic work has taken a variety of forms including pieces in e-lit, larp, netprov, and transmedia, often exploring themes related to structural oppression, social-ecological relations, and consent. Their work has been cited in Rob Wittig’s book, Netprov: Networked Improvised Literature for the Classroom and Beyond (Amherst College Press, 2021) and in Mark Marino’s book, Critical Code Studies (The MIT Press, 2020). In 2021, they served as an intern at NASA, and she is the former Development Director of a squatter’s mutual aid network in Oakland, CA. Steele presently resides on the unceded, ancestral lands of the Lummi and Nooksack people. (samarasteele.com)