Carceral Screens and the Abolitionist Imagination

UnionDocs Collaborative Studio: Carceral Screens and the Abolitionist Imagination

“Cop shows, prison films, and true crime docs have a long history of glorifying the criminal justice system, naturalizing its inherent violence, and narrowing the imaginative possibilities for abolition. We’ve joined hands with esteemed experimental filmmaker Christopher Harris in co-designing this Lab to devise ways to examine, contextualize and dismantle scripts of the carceral state using the archives of popular culture.

This CoLAB will bring together a talented group of passionate and motivated people to collect and organize examples of cinematic and televisual moving images that exemplify the fantasy of the prison-industrial complex. We will then work to expose their falsehood and oppressive power through short critical video essays, supercuts, mash-ups and interview segments, that hope to lend imagination and amplification to the abolitionist movement. To ground the research, we’re bringing in four scholars to share and discuss their work. To build a set of relevant examples of abolitionist imagination and inspire the creative, we’ve invited nine guest artists to come speak about their practices.”

Application deadline: April 30, 2021