ABOLITION DREAM MAPPING

How do maps, images, and other forms of creative story-telling contribute to the transdisciplinary work of decolonial abolition?

 

How does abolitionist and decolonial dreaming re-animate colonial and carceral concepts such as consent and authorship? What does this re-animation do to practices of co-creation, collaboration and transdisciplinary research methods?

 

Poet, scholar, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs invites us to embody the world-making praxis of abolition by growing and cultivating possibilities here and now, in the place where we happen to find ourselves:

 

"What if abolition isn’t a shattering thing, not a crashing thing, not a wrecking ball event?  What if abolition is something that sprouts out of the wet places in our eyes, the broken places in our skin, the waiting places in our palms, the tremble holding in my mouth when I turn to you? What if abolition is something that grows? Reflect on the place you stand. ...This dirt is as strong as we are, as full of alternative histories and forgotten resistance as our skin cells.  The place that you stand is ready with queer potentials that contradict the market that has been draining it all this time. (145-8)"

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Freedom Seeds: Growing Abolition in Durham, North Carolina” in Abolition now! Ten years of strategy and struggle against the prison industrial complex (ed. CR10 Publications Collective). Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008.

 

The challenge of our project was to cultivate this queer potential of abolitionist world-making at a time when entire cities are locked down in response to a global pandemic. Abolition Dream Mapping is a project from 12 graduate students at X University in Katarokwi. Originally conceived of as an in-person exhibition in collaboration with community partners, the project has been adapted to the digital world of this website.

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