Making Room
for Abolition

Each artifact—currency, quilts, mugs, valued possessions, and much more—posits earnest questions about how our lives might shift to make room for abolition through a lens we can all relate to: home. It posits multiple futures, writes Black and Indigenous people into these worlds, and places these futures in conversation with radical organizers challenging the prison industrial complex in their daily work.

How Do You Flash Your Lights?

Making Room for Abolition imagines futures through domestic objects, with aspirations of eventually composing a future archive of artifacts that help reveal worlds of possibility for us today in ways that help make abolition of police and prisons become more plausible and advance present-day organizing work. In this way, it’s surfacing the “unseen,” or what what has been obscured because we’re convinced it is impossible. Because the world posited in the original living room installation was situated in a future Detroit, it further reflects the structural, cultural, and environmental legacies of this city by carrying them into this imagined, liberatory future.