WEEK TWO
IDENTITY, JUSTICE & FREEDOM
Freedom Festival has always been rooted in conversations around identity, justice and the meaning of freedom.
Our second week explores these themes through a variety of artistic voices and forms. Through film, discussion and creative storytelling, artists reflect on what freedom means today and how it intersects with culture, community, and personal experience.
Company Chameleon: Strange Fruit
Created by dance company, Company Chameleon, and choreographed by Kevin Edward Turner MBE, Strange Fruit draws focus to the brutal act of lynching and the historical struggle that people of colour have endured.
At the heart of the dance film is an electrifying solo performance by dancer Kadafi Mulula, whose physicality creates a raw intensity that captivates.
Deeply moving, the power of the movement is exemplified by the lyrics and the overarching sounds of the trumpet, saxophone and piano in the song.
Strange Fruit is a dance film that transforms Billie Holiday’s famous song into a visual and visceral experience through movement, serving as a reminder of a brutal event that is part of our collective history.
Strange Fruit draws focus to the brutal and dehumanising act of lynching and the historical struggle that people of colour have endured.
Lynching is an act which saw people of colour across the southern United States being publicly killed, often by a mob and by hanging, for alleged offences without legal trial.
The song spotlights a period of history when lynching was rife between the late 19th to the mid-20th century and state and local laws enforced racial segregation.
Strange Fruit is a dance film made by Manchester dance company, Company Chameleon, who make original and inspiring dance productions, which they perform across the UK and the world.
Chameleon’s Artistic Director, Kevin Edward Turner MBE, choreographed the film, said: "I hope the film creates the space for the audience to be moved by the performer’s journey. For that movement to inspire reflection and thought around the consequences of what happens when you treat individuals as less than human. I want for people to know that this happened, that it is part of our collective history and to see the parallels in our own time where we dehumanise and brutalise others.”
Watch the video: Strange fruit
Choreography- Kevin Edward Turner MBE
Co-directed by - Kevin Edward Turner MBE & Ben Williams
Performed by - Kadafi Mulula
Watch the video: Landslides
Stewart Baxter X Samatar Elmi: Landslides
Commissioned by Freedom Festival Arts Trust for Freedom Online & On Demand 2022 A collaboration between Stewart Baxter (composer & visual artist) and Samatar Elmi (multi-awarded winning poet) is a cross-media exploration of identity, freedom and belonging centred around the themes of shifting and distorted audio-visual and lyrical landscapes. Rooted in the local early 00’s punk and DIY scene, Baxter and Elmi have since worked internationally, recently reconnecting to explore experimental collaborations that embrace geographical and logistical challenges as opportunities to expand their creative practice. Centred around a new spoken word piece, Elmi narrates his experience as a mixed-race British Somali who grew up in Hull but has lived around the world. In doing so, he has deepened his perspective on what it means to be a multi-cultural son of Hull. Collaborating across continents via WhatsApp, Baxter and Elmi are united through distorted projections and improvised atmospheric soundscapes brought together by Baxter as an audio-visual live performance.
Stewart Baxter is a composer, producer, and visual artist based in Hull who is the drummer for the internationally touring band LIFE, who are currently promoting their third album ‘North East Coastal Town’ after previous receiving Album Of The Year status at BBC Radio 1 and securing eight playlisted singles across BBC 6 Music. Stewart has recently been commissioned and delivered work for Humber Street Gallery, Absolutely Cultured and Sound and Music developing his practice within found sounds, tape loops and experimental audio. Winner of the 2021 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, Samatar Elmi is an Obsidian Fellow, Numbi Associate Poetry Editor and graduate of the Young Inscribe Mentoring Program. Poems have appeared in Poetry Review, Magma, Iota and anthologised in More Fiya, Filigree, After Plath, and the Echoing Gallery. Elmi's ‘Portrait of Colossus’ was selected as the PBS Summer Pamphlet of Choice. As Knomad Spock, his most recent album, ‘Winter of Discontent’ was critically acclaimed in print (Clash Magazine, Afropunk, GoldFlakePaint, Equate Magazine) and radio (BBC 6 Music, BBC Wales, Amazing Radio, Radio X). Elmi has performed live in session for Janice Long (BBC Wales), has been recently featured in the Guardian poetry round up and he was highlighted as ‘Ones To Watch’ at Latitude Festival.
Freedom Womens Collective: Tomorrow
An enduring reference to hope, belief and self-determination. In every language, tomorrow can be a promise, a practical arrangement or a philosophical proposition. It is always a way of looking to the future, together.
A commission with Freedom Festival and funding from Imperial War Museum, the artists weave stories from Ethiopia, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Sudan using visual and textile art, sculpture, performance, poetry and photography.
Freedom Women Collective are women who survived war, conflict and persecution: artists Arafa Hassan Gouda, Nisreen Barazi, Gaida Dirar, Shuke Halake Aeroro and Faisa Omar, with Lee Karen Stow and curator Sarah Perks.
Watch the video: Tomorrow
Listen to the episode: Special Days in My Country
Listen to the episode: Sport
WELCOME TO ENGLISH
Welcome to English is a community group based, that helps refugees, asylum seekers, and newcomers learn English and integrate into the local community. It offers language classes and social activities like gardening, music, and crafting, whilst partnering with local organisations to opportunities for further development and integration.
Freedom Festival Arts Trust have partnered with welcome to English for a number of years and over the coming weeks you will hear a series of short podcasts that give you flavour of what some of the participants in our work get up.
Following on from Week One's episode 'My Weekend', this week's episodes are titled 'Special Days in My Country' & 'Sport'
Wilberforce Institute Debate: Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution
The origins of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 – the only successful enslaved revolt in history and a major event in the making of the modern world – remains shrouded in mystery. For French colonists in Saint Domingue, it sprang up without explanation as if it was a spontaneous event. In a hugely important new book, A Secret Among the Blacks: Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution, published this September by Harvard University Press, the distinguished historian of Saint Domingue and the Haitian Revolution, John Garrigus of the University of Texas at Arlington, shows that the start of the Haitian Revolution has a history based on slave resistance in the northern sugar producing plains of Saint Domingue.
The Wilberforce Institute is proud to discuss this major intervention into the history of slavery and the Caribbean in this webinar.
Watch the video here:
Credits: Professor Trevor Burnard, Director of the Wilberforce Institute; John D. Garrigus, Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London; Laurent Dubois, Professor of History and Co-Director of the Democracy Initiative at the University of Virginia; Dominique Rogers, Assistant Professor (MCF) of History at the University of the Antilles; Mélanie Lamotte, Assistant Professor of French and History at the University of Texas at Austin; Meleisa Ono-George, Brittenden Fellow in History at Queen’s College, Oxford; Dexnell Peters, Lecturer in Caribbean and Atlantic History at the University of the West Indies, Mona.
Watch the video here:
Project Artist: Lauren Saunders Community Co-
Creators: Refugee and children seeking asylum aged 4-11 years old from the National Initiative for Creative Education
Commissioners: Hull and East Riding Friends of the Earth
Funders: Rights Community Action, as part of the Shorelines Project.
Site Partners: Yorkshire Wildlife Trust
Film-Makers: Chris Hopkin and Iain Thompson from Storyboard Media
Lauren Saunders: Where the Beings Are
In June 2023, Lauren Saunders co-created a temporary, site-specific, biodegradable public art installation with local refugee and asylum seeker children within the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust Tangle HQ/Wildlife Garden at Pearson Park.
This nature-based artwork (which has been funded by Rights Community Action and commissioned by Hull Friends of the Earth as part of the Shorelines: A Perfect Storm project) hopes to communicate how protecting green spaces helps mitigate the impacts of flooding whilst creating an intimate, inhabitable space for nature connectedness and appreciation. This is especially pertinent down Princes Avenue – where the installation is – as it should be underwater by 2030 (according to flood projection maps).
The story – and artwork – is a metaphor for how the human species has largely forgotten how to ‘see’ the intrinsic value, agency and inter-connectivity of the more-than-human (whether physical or magical).