Cartographies of the Present: Charting Our Freedom Dreams
The W.O.W. Project Fall Public Program Series
We launched Cartographies of the Present: Charting Our Freedom Dreams in Fall 2023, 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 examined how the terms of carceral expansion restricted our demands for change and our possibilities for movement-building. Inspired by speculative fiction and abolition, we invited our community to embark on a journey with us through the past, future, and a vast multiverse of possibilities.
Our destination: the present. How did 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 unlocked our imaginations and expanded our capacities to dream of—and build towards—better futures.
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 launched 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 explored 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.
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 made work that centered 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 nurtured and empowered 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 at the End of the World
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,” was 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 wanted 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
The W.O.W. Project and story holder and memory worker, Kale Mays @basicbrassica held our final program of our fall series Cartographies of the Present: Charting Our Freedom Dreams. Making Possibility: Art, Craft, Culture as Worldmaking offered 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 worked 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.