As part of ASAP/15: Not A Luxury, a conference for the Association for the Study of Arts in the Present, I’ll be presenting alongside Aviva Avnisan, dana middleton, Molly Merryman, and Dan Paz on a panel called “Listening sessions: Queer Abolition, the Aesthetics of Unsame Solidarities, and Oral Histories of LGBTQ+ Incarceration”.

The submitted abstract for the panel is below, with more details to come!

This session allows for an open conversation between collaborators and attendees to discuss how queer working methods allow us to navigate the asymmetrical power dynamics inherent in the movement, study, and activism toward abolition. Initiated by a group of artists, scholars, and activists under the name Switchboard – a marker that gestures to the telephone as a primary form of communication for incarcerated people while also acknowledging the legacy of New York’s Gay Switchboard in the ’70s and ‘80s amidst the AIDS epidemic – this forum builds from their distinct yet overlapping commitments that texture their involvement towards the development of an AI-based open-source oral history tool highlighting experiences of LGBTQ+ incarcerated people. 

In artist and researcher alejandro t. acierto's work, he maps the influence of industrial carceral labor in the colonial Philippines to the mainland US, where the development of goods for sale drew tourists to the prisons which further justified the broader imperial project. Speaking on their book project Exposing the Hero, artist and scholar Dan Paz traces how photographic practices such as the mugshot shaped the affective registers of carceral surveillance that significantly shifted how policing happened and by whom. Artist and creative technologist Ava Aviva Avnisan addresses how emerging technologies can be deployed “against the grain” to center marginalized voices, where they focus on recent and ongoing creative projects. Animating Dr. Molly Merryman’s work is an attention to queer methods that transform research where she focuses on oral histories and museum work as vital components for repositioning the lives of marginalized and “discarded” folks. Highlighting the overlapping aesthetic tensions of volunteering within Department of Corrections facilities as a trans person committed to the disruption of prisons, dana middleton’s work considers the slippery edges of abolitionist work that they do inside the prisons, probing pertinent questions about the optics of that work and the extent to which it is effective. 

Adding depth to the conversation are reflections, notes, ideas, and questions by incarcerated people following workshops with current and recently incarcerated LGBTQ+ people conducted by Switchboard in Puget Sound earlier in the summer. By centering the voices of queer, trans, and gender-expansive individuals experiencing incarceration from the inside, this dialogue offers dedicated time to listen to how various practices, projects, and research touch each other as a way to luxuriate in the critical and creative potential that make queer abolition not only a reality but a necessity.