Imagining New Worlds

After abolition: what next? Abolition is not just about tearing everything down, it’s about imagining and building new, revolutionary futures.

Racial capitalism prevents us from the vital work of imagining different futures. But when we can find ways to create, speculate, envisage, together, the possibilities are endless. Art is one path of abolition and rebuilding, for our movements, our politics, our environments, our histories and ourselves. To imagine new worlds is to start creating them.

Our final panel brings together artists and writers who work with alternate realities and revolutionary futures to ask: what sets us free?

Hosted by Layla-Roxanne Hill, writer/curator-artist/organiser, our speakers will be: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, an artist whose work seeks to archive Black trans experience, using technology to imagine black trans lives in environments that centre our bodies; Francesca Sobande, lecturer, researcher and writer with a particular focus on digital culture, Black diaspora, feminism, creative work and popular culture; Morgan M Page, Canadian writer, performance and video artist, and activist currently based in London, who writes and hosts the trans history podcast One From the Vaults; Cory Cocktail, power exchange architect and escort, and a post disciplinary artist with an interest in the intersections of the body and technology; and Khaleb Brooks, multi- disciplinary artist and researcher exploring blackness, transness, the body and collective memory.

This event will be live captioned and recorded.

A link to attend will be sent out by email 1 hour before the live event. After the event we will also send out a link of the recording to everyone who has registered for a ticket. If you're not able to attend but would like to be updated when the recording is available, please register for a ticket to ensure you receive this.

We can build a different world is a weekly series of events being held throughout September 2020 exploring abolition and mutual aid in the UK. This series is organised as a collaboration between Decriminalised Futures, Abolitionist Futures and Verso, with support from Arika. All funds from the event will be used in support of the Decriminalised Futures project.