a season of drops: Making Room for Abolition goes ONLINE 👩🏾💻
Dearest newsletter friends,
Several seasons have passed and I’ve been MIA, I know. I have excuses, but I’ll spare you. Just know that your subscriptions and the promise of your eventual attention have not gone to waste! Besides, who needs another email finding them unwell in these trying times.
Alas, I’m back with some news, finally.
Three extremely long years ago, I started a body of work called Making Room for Abolition as an artist-in-residence at the Detroit Justice Center. It first showed up as an installation of a living room from a world without police and prisons at Red Bull Arts. Making Room for Abolition imagines a world without police and prisons by making speculative worlds through the lens of a home. This initial installation explored the contours of possible abolitionist worlds by crafting speculative domestic artifacts and speculative stories. Over the years, I’ve played around with workshops that invite other folks—other Detroit-based organizers and artists, mostly—to try their hand at imagining abolitionist futures through objects, too.
Today, makingroom.online drops: a digital archive holding the artifacts from that 2021 installation plus a few other surprises, coming soon. The digital archive is a place you can explore in whatever way works for you: there’s no wrong door and time is a bit strange, but that’s on purpose. I worked with designer Em Woudenberg of Strike Design Studio to imagine a structure for entering the site that can either lead you to a specific “room” of artifacts or essays or can jump you straight into an archival entry. In this way, it’s a lot like the installation, where the story each visitor composed depended almost entirely on where their attention settled as they walked through the room(s), whether they read the fine print on the guaranteed income check; if they stopped to connect the dots between Grandma Mary’s memory jug, her obituary, and her novel on the side table; or if the ginger beer caught their eye.
This site is a long-overdue beginning. To me, a lot of it is old news—but I have to remind myself that even if I’ve been thinking about it nonstop for the last 1,000-some days, the Internet hasn’t seen these artifacts yet, and it was never meant to live only in Detroit, so bringing Making Room from physical to digital space was an important step. But, it’s also a vessel for future imaginings, a space to grow into, and a space into which I can invite other people to continue imagining abolitionist realities. If imagining abolitionist worlds is your jam, hit my line.
You’ll be hearing from me a little more over the next couple months as I drop a few other things on the same platform. Til then, have fun checking out the site!