Episode 3: The first principle is the principle of Lostness: Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman
Julie talks with poet-artist Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman about his project Wierzba Estery / Esther’s Willow, a collaboration with artists Katarzyna and Marta Sala in Chrzanów (PL), a half-Jewish city until the Nazi genocide and postwar processes that continued a long century of ethnic cleansing. The project gestures into the city’s traumatic recent past to reach an old and intimate space of transcultural ancestral experience and horizontal implication, where Jewish and Slavic communities in Poland mutually, collaboratively, and differently depended on willow trees to treat viruses, diseases, infertility, and bodily pain, exchanging knowledge, treatments, practitioners, and patients at a site of nonhuman mourning that continues, even nominally (“weeping willow”), to mediate between the living and the dead.
We also discuss Robert’s earlier piece, Lost in Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee. This project came into its most public manifestation in response to the 2018 Great March of Return massacres in Gaza. Robert enacted what he calls a “Counter-Ruin,” in which “Gaza” is written across his back in three languages as he walks through Berlin carrying stones to deposit in Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee, the largest Jewish cemetery in Berlin.
We discuss the urgent need for a “new universalism” or a “critical universalism,” and the seemingly intractable problem of, and violence inherent within, the nation-state. “Instead of space we have time and text: that’s Judaism,” says Robert, as we seek a principle of the unfinished and unsettled.
Projects discussed:
Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman is a fourth generation Ashkenazi-American settler from places in the traditional territory of the Lenape diaspora, with ancestral ties to eradicated Jewish communities in Warsaw, Jaroslaw and Rzeszów (PL), Chișinău (MLD), Dnipro (UKR), and Seirijai (LITH). Sniderman constructs interventions, texts, plays, films, and installations with/in overwritten and denied places and materials, tracing local experience to and from entangled catastrophes. Often in collaboration with other artists and specific communities, his interventions, texts, plays, films, sculptures, and installations establish difficult situations for durational contemplation and vernacular rites, manifesting a quiet language of intense proximity over time by radicalizing accidents, anxieties, and memory. His works include the performance archive Lost in Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee (2016-19); the film Night Herons (2018-21) created with Joanna Rajkowska; the public project Wierzba Estery / Esther's Willow (2018- ) created with Katarzyna and Marta Sala; السماء إلى الصعود بيان Flight Manifesto (2019-23), a serial walk on the Noxwsʼáʔaq River created with Cascadia Deaf Nation, Brel Froebe, Dirar Kalash, Harlin Steele, and others; and ئێستا كاتیهتی تاڵهكان ڕاكێشی دارستانه سووتاوهكه بكرێن Now it’s time to pull the threads into the burning forest (2023- ), a memorial project in exile for Rojhelat (Eastern Kurdistan) created with Nastaran Saremy. He is Assistant Professor in Socially Engaged Art at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Western Washington University and Visiting Professor at the Institut für Kunst im Kontext, Universität der Künste Berlin (2023-24). The photo of Robert is by Cheong Kin Man, 2024.
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