Making Room for Abolition is a body of work that imagines a world without police and prisons by making speculative worlds through the lens of a home. This work explores the contours of possible abolitionist worlds by crafting speculative domestic artifacts; imagining, writing and reading speculative stories; and interweaving those dispatches from abolitionist imaginaries with conversations about present-day abolitionist practices.

This work and many of the artifacts collected here first materialized as an installation of a living room from a world without police and prisons at Red Bull Arts in 2021.

About this Site

This website is an archive of abolitionist realities—futures and alternate presents—expressed as artifacts, dispatches, and essays. It presents a distributed storytelling project comprised of three different types of media that are connected in various ways: 

• ‍Artifacts are specific objects and sounds from (various) abolitionist realities, they may be situated in alternative pasts, presents, or futures; 

• Essays are big-picture thematic narratives that bring artifacts in conversation with real-life interviews with abolitionist organizers, other references, soundscapes;

• COMING SOON

  Dispatches are short stories that offer a glimpse into the world(s) in which these abolitionist realities are imagined;

Contributors

Lead Artist | executive producer

Lauren Williams (she/they) is a Detroit-based designer, researcher and educator. They work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power over Black life and death.

Co-Producer | essays

Ayinde Jean-Baptiste (he/him) is an organizer turned strategist whose work is story-driven: cultivating and protecting people's voices and self-perception as capable of changing their environments or circumstances. As a multimedia storyteller, they use voice to shift culture, engaging with communities through listening, memory-making, and movement.

audio engineer

Conor Anderson (he/him) is an Audio Engineer and Producer for 101.9 WDET, ensuring quality audio content for the station from underwriting to live bands, podcasts, and broadcasts. Before joining WDET, Anderson was an ethnomusicological documentarian and the lead audio engineer for Red Bull Radio Detroit. He is a graduate of The University of Michigan, where he received a degree in Sound Media and Culture. 

Web Designer

Em Woudenberg (they/them) of Strike Design Studio offers frank consultancy and striking solutions for print and screens. With over a decade of experience, they have worked with notable brands and have exhibited their work across the world.

Studio Photographer

Radical Play, led by Na Forest Lim, they/them, is a photo and film studio that makes art to share unique + beautiful truths of Detroit artists, BIPOC, queer, disabled, immigrants, sex workers, & other marginalized individuals. Their creative purpose is to shift unbalanced personal narratives and transform societal issues.

Acknowledgments

This work, from 2021 through today, was made possible with funding from the Detroit Justice Center, Art 4 Justice Fund, The Center for Cultural Power, Race Forward, and Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.