Visualizing Abolition is organized by Professor Gina Dent, Feminist Studies and Dr. Rachel Nelson, Director, IAS, with support from the Mellon Foundation. The events feature artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition.
Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi and Ntone Edjabe will discuss the recent publication of FESTAC ’77, an innovative book and mixtape which is the product of years of research helmed by Chimurenga—a magazine based in Cape Town, South Africa, and one of the most important cultural journals on the continent—in collaboration with Afterall, the London-based journal. Listen to the FESTAC '77 mixtape here.
The artworks of Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds include multi-disciplinary forms of public art messages, large scale drawings, neuf series acrylic paintings, prints, works in glass and […]
Afronauts, a 2014 short film by Ghanaian-born filmmaker Nuotama Frances Bodomo, follows a team of astronauts as they train for a mission to the moon. This video was inspired by the Zambian space program in the 1960s and follows then-17-year-old astronaut Matha Mwamba, the woman at the center of this historic mission. Led by schoolteacher and revolutionary Edward Mukuka Nkoloso, Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy began as an unofficial program with aspirations to beat the Soviet Union and the United States to the moon.
A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrete sounds. Join us May 14, 2022 at 7 p.m. for a live music performance by this world-renowned musician, joined also by Alex Wand, Seth Glickman, Odeya Nini, Archie Carey, Brock Stuessi, Kyle Bruckmann, Vanessa Ruotolo, and William Winant for a uniquely collaborative concert.
In 1964, Edward Makuka Nkoloso, a member of the Zambian resistance movement and the founder of the Zambia National Academy of Science, began to train the first African crew to travel to the moon. Although space travel was not realized, the Zambian Space Program has since captured the imagination of contemporary artists and filmmakers on the African continent and beyond. Nuotamo Bodoomo, Larry Achiampong and Aaron Samuel Mulenga will talk about how imaginings of space travel are utilized in their disparate practices. The discussion will center on the politics and possibilities the artists and filmmakers find in the creative transcendence of space and time.
As a politic and a practice, abolition increasingly shapes our political moment—halting the construction of new jails and propelling movements to divest from policing. Yet erased from this landscape are not only the central histories of feminist—usually queer, anti-capitalist, grassroots, and women of color—organizing that continue to cultivate abolition but a recognition of the stark reality: abolition is our best response to endemic forms of state and interpersonal gender and sexual violence.
Performed in site-specific locations and onstage, Raissa Simpson will be performing an excerpt of EMME YA: Expedition, which applies a conceptual underpinning of Afro-technoculture through movement and media. This ongoing exploration includes various frameworks to reimagine paths of survival that are born out of moments of collective trauma and the reclamation of Afrofuturism as a creative metaphor for healing.
“Reasonable Doubts: Making an Exoneree” is taught by Professor Sharon Daniel, UCSC Film and Digital Media, in collaboration with Professor of Government and Law at Georgetown Marc Howard and his childhood friend, Adjunct Professor Marty Tankleff, who was himself wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for almost 18 years before being exonerated. Howard and Tankleff developed Georgetown’s Making an Exonoree course in 2018, and its students have already won the release of three men and made significant progress in the legal prospects of several others.
