🔊 Ep 5 👂🏾Time: Carceral Chronopolitics
Carceral Fictions & Abolitionist Realities
In this week’s drop, we get into a theme that shaped this work and runs through much of my own practice, more broadly: time. Speaking of time, this episode is a bit of a throwback: in it, we revisit some reflections about the ways time was translated into space—or space was leveraged to reflect the complexities of time—as visitors moved through the installation from which this work was birthed. As you probably know by now, this audio series emerged from an installation of a living room from an abolitionist world(s) that was housed at Red Bull Arts in Detroit in October 2021.
Listen and view the full transcript on makingroom.online or listen wherever you get your podcasts:
What are memories of lands, waters or peoples, without time? What is the future? And, if we are unequipped to view time, like rivers, as currency to be manipulated, resource rather than relation, what have we already lost? In this episode, Lauren Williams shows us that these questions too, are political, introducing to the broader archive the concept of chronopolitics. She asks us to consider the question of Grace Lee and James Boggs: “What time is it on the clock of the world?” while her guests chime in with considerations of kinship, urgency, and magic. She also highlights the relationship between time and punishment in a world that may itself be more temporary than dominant narratives suggest.
As always, the entire series was lovingly co-produced by Ayinde Jean Baptiste; audio was mastered by Conor Anderson; and our theme music is the instrumentals from Detroit Summer, by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media. This project is presented in partnership with Respair Production and Media.
Thank you for listening on makingroom.online or wherever you get your podcasts.
We have just one more episode to go to complete the series — stay tuned for our final episode, dropping on Wednesday, February 6. Same time, same place.