Borough Based Liberation Project

The Borough Based Liberation Project (BBLP) co-hosted by Chinatown Art Brigade & the W.O.W. Project  

The Borough Based Liberation Project is a series of neighborhood cultural events and interventions to collectively vision abolition, climate justice, migrant justice, and housing futures in New York City. For the month of September, our project will activate this storefront to serve as a centralized hub for our organizing. As our communities converge, learn, and share together, we will co-create an intersectional space that connects our local and global struggles to build solidarity and power. The project’s “Abolitionist Futures” theme will spotlight local resistance and link struggles for liberation from NYC to Palestine to indigenous territories in Abya Yala through art workshops, exhibitions, teach-ins, gatherings, performances, and celebrations.  

Chinatown has always been a site of resilience and resistance. For the past several years, there has been a growing grassroots abolitionist movement against the city’s Borough-Based Jails plan set to expand NYC’s carceral facilities with four new jails at the cost of $15 billion. Adjacent to this building is the site of the new Chinatown jail, set to become the tallest jail in the world.  When we fight for Chinatown, we must know and celebrate the generations of dissenters and stewards that came before us. We seek to share stories from some of these movements and to imagine and grow structures of accountability and community justice within our intersecting struggles.

We hope this project will provide our communities with a nexus to oppose the political and economic forces that threaten to displace us from our homes, even as funding for cages, policing, deportation, resource extraction, and war increases rampantly. We hope to encourage community members to join abolitionist struggles that oppose increased policing, new and old jails, prisons, and detention centers, prevent extraction in indigenous territories, and support Palestinian liberation.

This month-long series is facilitated by the Borough Based Liberation Project, Chinatown Art Brigade, the W.O.W. Project, Black Indigenous Liberation Movement, and Dandelions NYC in collaboration with Lavender Phoenix, Asians 4 Palestine, Protect Sunset Park, LEGAIA, Cal Hsiao, Tif Ng, Sonia Tsang, Chris Deng, Tania Mattos, Sunnie Liu, Malaika Temba, Louise Yeung, Daphne Lundi, Megan Hattie Stahl, Black and Pink, Ashiñwaka Sapara Women’s Association (Ecuador), MIX NYC, Recess and many others. Space generously provided by Immigrant Social Services’ Storefront for Ideas.

Background

The Borough-based Liberation Project (BBLP) is a riff off of the Borough Based Jail Community Construction Office which is the “community engagement” office for the new Chinatown jailscraper located at 110 Walker Street. Our BBLP will be activated at 127 Walker Street. Our project will be located around the corner from the new jail site in which there is growing grassroots community resistance and opposition to, and in fact the back wall of the space shares a wall with the new jail.

PROGRAMMING

• Fri, 9/6, 6-9pm - Borough Based Liberation Project Public Launch Opening
• Sat, 9/7, 3-5pm - Share Your Chinatown Placekeeping Story (audio gathering workshop)
• Sat 9/7 6-9pm - Prisoners’ Resistance: A Community Reading of Tip of the Spear
• Sun 9/8 2-4pm - Abolition Tea Time
• Wed 9/11 7-9pm - From Close Rikers Now to Queens Cop City: Resisting the Borough-Based Jail Plan Teach-in
• Sat 9/14 4-6pm - "Chinatown is a Site of Resistance” Abolition Photo Exhibition Teach-in
• Sat 9/14 6-7:30pm - “Collage with our Archives” Workshop
• Sun 9/15 12-5pm - Letters for Liberation w/ Black and Pink
• Thurs 9/19 6:30-8pm - Panel: "Envisioning Abolition Futures through Arts, Cultural Organizing, Media"
• Fri 9/20 6-9pm - Opposing Carceral Design Panel
• Sat. 9/21 2-5p - Asians for Palestine Youth Workshop
• Sun 9/22 12-2pm - Trees of Our Homes Workshop (for children ages 6-10)
• Sun 9/22 2-4pm - Abolition Tea Time
• Sun 9/22 3-5pm - Here to Stay - AR Placekeeping Walking Tour with Map Zine
• Mon 9/23 6-9pm - Climate Week Opening Event
• Thurs 9/26 6:30-9pm - Climate Week film screening w/ BILM, Witness, and others
• Sat 9/28 10-4pm - Indigenous & Community Justice Practices Teach-in
• Sat 9/28 6-9pm: BBLP Closing event

EXHIBITIONS, ART AND EPHEMERA‍

Art, photography, ephemera and socially engaged art presented by CAB, the W.O.W. Project, Cal Hsiao, Tif Ng, Sonia Tsang, Chris Deng, Asians 4 Palestine, Sunnie Liu, Malaika Temba, Louise Yeung, Daphne Lundi, Dandelions / BILM / Ashiñwaka / Legaia / Fridays for Future NYC, selected artists from our Abolition Art Open Call, and others.

‍GROUND LEVEL

Selections from Chinatown Art Brigade’s Archives‍

These works represents a small selection from their eight year history. The exhibition includes archival material, photographs, videos, placekeeping maps, large scale projections, as well as banners, posters and other direct action ephemera. One of the main features of the exhibition is their mapping and multimedia installation that centers the stories of people most directly impacted by displacement, with the long ­term goal of protecting and preserving our beloved neighborhood. The project features short videos and testimonials from tenants, residents and housing activists telling their own stories. Interactive media platforms like Augmented Reality (AR), QR codes, and mapping are used to present these stories to help viewers unpack the lived experience of evictions and gentrification. The selection highlights their abolition organizing against the jailscraper bring built in Chinatown that is being touted as the “tallest jail in the world”. We hope this exhibition will not only inspire people to take creative action, but also help unleash our collective radical imagination to fight for a degentrified, liberated and abolitionist future.

‍Selections from the W.O.W. Project ‍

The WOW Project has a selection of artwork, banners, signs and other ephemera that were activated during their “Springs from Below: People’s Abolition Parade” that marched through the streets of Chinatown in June 2024.

‍"Chinatown is a Site of Resistance” photo exhibition curated by Cal Hsiao, Tif Ng, Sonia Tsang, Chris Deng

‍As the city continues construction of the world’s tallest jail in Chinatown, the neighborhood has organized protests, rallies, and even lawsuits to stop or delay the jail's progress. Community photographers have documented these actions and meticulously chronicle the site of their changing neighborhood. Through photographs and ephemera, Chinatown is a Site of Resistance showcases how a community documents itself and its own history of resistance in the face of the carceral state. The artists in this exhibit provoke questions around resistance, provide context of the space, and envision an abolitionist future. Chinatown does not want a megajail to be built in the neighborhood, that much is clear. However there are a multitude of opinions on what comes next. Participants are invited to consider: What might an abolitionist future look like in Chinatown?"

‍Works from Asians 4 Palestine

‍Featuring photos, video, ephemera and zines from the last 10 months of protest against the genocide in Gaza and in solidarity with the Free Palestine movement.

‍MEZZANINE LEVEL

“Amplitude” by Parallax: Malaika Temba and Sunnie Liu

‍A two-channel video envisions community-driven alternatives to incarceration sites in Harlem and Chinatown. By highlighting anonymous responses from both neighborhoods, the work reaffirms that both our struggles and liberation are intertwined. The installation and participatory social practice define abolition as an ongoing process and constant practice. Through abolitionist reimagining, Amplitude invigorates collective dreaming of what is possible and needed in Black and Asian communities instead of carceral logic and systems.

‍“Play + Placemaking for Afro-Asian Solidarity” by Daphne Lundi and Louise Yeung

‍How can we design cities to build solidarity between Black and Asian communities? "Play + Placemaking for Afro-Asian Solidarity" was a workshop led by artists and urban planners Daphne Lundi and Louise Yeung at the Laundromat Project in January 2024. Using found objects, participants reimagined places that have historically been sites of tension between Black and Asian communities in New York City. Tapping into the power of play and worldbuilding, participants created places for healing and reconciliation through transformed communal spaces, cross-diasporic food exchanges, and intergenerational play.