We Do Declare project, 2017
This is a contemporary reading of the #DeclarationOfIndependence as part of the WE DO DECLARE project.
With an ensemble of 56 readers from across America and around the world, the Declaration was revisited in the summer of 2017, By The People, For The People with notes of prescient protests to the political circumstances impact the U.S. and the world after the election outcomes of November 2016. The simple goal: To engage our citizenry by getting people to really listen to these words. To hear them, not just as a historical document, but as a present call-to-action, from a diverse chorus of voices that we recognize, with the additional understanding that the Constitution and Bill of Rights that follow this document are still insufficient in providing equal rights to all. There were originally 56 signatures attached to the Declaration, inclusive of domestic and foreign born signees, so We collaborated with a diverse collective of 56 multicultural, multigenerational people from across the country and around the world, 241 years later, to make this urgent protest piece in solidarity titled: WE DO DECLARE.
This project is one that recognizes the irony of this declaration on the unceded ancestral lands of the indigenous and native tribes of Turtle Island (North America). The intention is not to lose convenient sight of this, but to invite discourse around the colonial histories that see us all at the complex intersection of settler occupation, by violent force, circumstantial coercion, or problematic inheritances of imperial privilege. This urgent protest piece uses the aspirational yet insufficient words in the declaration in the hopes of engaging civil discourse and action to preserve and improve the potential functions of a liberated and equitable society for all its inhabitants.
Recently screened at Capitol Hill Arts District Streaming Festival, Seattle, WA
April 29th, 2020 with Photographic Center NW and Northwest Film Forum
#WeDoDeclare #WeDoDeclareProject #LifeLibertyHappiness #WeThePeople #ARTasActivism
Sojourner Truth, 1864 (American ca, 1797 - 1883). “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance”. Source: Public Domain, Metropolitan Museum
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Descendants of Frederick Douglas Read His Speech, ‘What To The Slave Is The Fourth of July?' - an NPR sponsored reading in Summer 2020, in the heat of BLM protests to July 4th celebrations after the murder of George Floyd
WE DO DECLARE is a project of i.ma.gine | e.volve®