Cartographies of the Present: Charting Our Freedom Dreams
The W.O.W. Project Fall Public Program Series
We are excited to launch Cartographies of the Present: Charting Our Freedom Dreams, a series of public programs aimed at unsettling the relationships between arts/culture, social movements, and carceral expansion.
As plans to build the world’s tallest jail in Manhattan’s Chinatown continue to unfold, we must examine how the terms of carceral expansion restrict our demands for change and our possibilities for movement-building. Inspired by speculative fiction and abolition, we invite you to embark on a journey with us through the past, future, and a vast multiverse of possibilities.
Our destination: the present. How might these unexpected passageways help us better understand our present and where we go from here? Through interactive workshops and experimental forms of collective learning, we aim to unlock our imaginations and expand our capacities to dream of—and build towards—better futures.
These programs are open to anyone who is interested in learning; no prior knowledge or experience required.
Program Lineup:
The Jail, the Police, and the People’s Chinatown: A Zine Launch Party
Thursday, October 19th at 127 Walker St.
Unmaking Dystopia: Abolition at the End of the World
Saturday, November 11th at 26 Mott St.
Making Possibility: Art, Craft, Culture as Worldmaking
Saturday, December 2nd at 26 Mott St.
The Jail, the Police, and the People's Chinatown: A Zine Launch Party
Thursday, October 19th 6-8PM
At The Storefront for Ideas, 127 Walker Street, New York NY 10013
We are so excited to launch two zines, “Envisioning Abolition in Our Local Asian American Communities” by Chinatown Art Brigade (CAB), and “The Jail, the Police, and the People’s Chinatown” by Serena Yang that explore the connections between the proposed jail in Chinatown, the police and other forms of state control, and people’s struggles for self-determination in Chinatown. Swing by to pick up copies of these zines, enjoy light refreshments, and engage in activities and conversation around the urgent questions that ignite these zines.
Thank you to The Laundromat Project for funding the printing of “The Jail, the Police, and the People’s Chinatown.”
About Chinatown Art Brigade
Chinatown Art Brigade (CAB) is an intergenerational collective driven by the fundamental belief that our cultural, material, and aesthetic modes of production have the power to advance social change. CAB is comprised of Asian American and Asian diasporic identifying visual artists, media makers, writers, educators, and organizers with deep roots in Manhattan's Chinatown. Together we make work that centers art and culture as a way to support community-led campaigns around issues of gentrification and displacement.
About The Storefront for Ideas
Immigrant Social Services (ISS) is a community-based non-profit organization dedicated to improving the conditions of underserved immigrants and children of immigrants in NYC Manhattan’s Lower East side and Chinatown. Through programs and services, we nurture and empower immigrant children/youth (ages 4-17), young adults (ages 18-26), seniors, and families to develop and restore their agency to strengthen the wellbeing of our community.
Unmaking Dystopia: Abolition
Session A: Saturday, November 11th 4-6PM / Session B: Wednesday, November 15th, 6-8PM
At The Wing On Wo & Co Storefront, 26 Mott Street, New York NY 10013
The second program of our fall series, “Cartographies of the Present: Charting Our Freedom Dreams,” will be an opportunity to study the trajectory of prisons and punishment in the United States and New York City. Why was Rikers Island built? Why do reformers want to close it? By tracing different stories of “the jail” from the 18th c. to the present day, including moments of resistance and rupture, we hope to better understand how the fight against the Chinatown “megajail” is locally and historically situated as well as profoundly connected to other struggles—across the world, time, and space—for life, justice, and self-determination.
Making Possibility: Art, Craft, Culture as Worldmaking
Saturday, December 2nd 2-4PM
At Thomas Paine Park
Join The W.O.W. Project and story holder and memory worker, Kale Mays @basicbrassica, for our final program of our fall series Cartographies of the Present: Charting Our Freedom Dreams. Making Possibility: Art, Craft, Culture as Worldmaking will offer an opportunity to hold collective grief within the interlaced layers of ecocide and genocide that have led to the repeated construction, demolition, and resurrection of The Tombs on the sacred shore of long-buried fresh waters. Together, we will work to propagate community memory and vision shared possibilities through ritual offerings to the paved landscapes and buried waters that we now refer to as Lower Manhattan.