XO & Struggle is screening for a suggested donation of $15 / $7 reduced price on Friday, December 16th at 7:30PM
We are cozy cuddly, armed and dangerous, and we will raze the fucking prisons to the ground.
— George Jackson Brigade
Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.
— Ruth Wilson Gilmore
The call for abolition is not one of destruction, but of creativity, comradeship, and collective making. The struggle against police and prisons is the struggle for a better, more just world; in transforming the conditions that produce carceral violence we infuse our work with the joys of political possibility and, in turn, create new opportunities for care and abundance. Drawing inspiration from the George Jackson Brigade’s communique sign-off, “love and struggle,” XO & Struggle is not a memorial but a call to action, an invocation of a political project at times daunting and mournful, and yet always pulsing with renewed life.
Post-screening conversation with filmmakers Alex Johnston, Kelly Gallagher, and Cameron A. Granger in person & filmmaker Christopher Harris via Zoom.
PROGRAM:
DARK CELL HARLEM FARM Alex Johnston, 2022, 26 min.
Set against the backdrop of the long and brutal history of the Texas prison system–from Juneteenth to Covid–Dark Cell Harlem Farm explores the death by suffocation of eight Black men at a prison plantation in 1913. Combining readings of primary source materials and personal reflections by formerly incarcerated individuals, footage of the prison landscapes where the incident took place, a series of graphical interventions and excavations, and a haunting original score by composer (and Texas native) Zachary James Watkins, the film makes an urgent and uncompromising argument for the impossibility of prison reform and the necessity of prison abolition.
FROM ALLY TO ACCOMPLICE Kelly Gallagher, 2015, 18 min.
"To-day at last we know: John Brown was right." -W.E.B. Du Bois. This film is an experimental essay in three movements that explores the importance of being more than an "ally" in struggle, by sharing histories of committed accomplices John Brown, Marilyn Buck, and others. The film also delves into the history of the landscape and former prairie that was the earth on which Brown's militants trained. In the face of exploitation of people and destruction of land, radical struggle cultivates new life.
DREAMS UNDER CONFINEMENT Christopher Harris, 2021, 3 min.
Frenzied voices on the Chicago Police Department’s scanner call for squad cars and reprisals during the 2020 uprising in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, as Google Earth tracks the action through simulated aerial views of urban spaces and the vast Cook County Department of Corrections, the country’s third-largest jail system. In Christopher Harris’s Dreams Under Confinement, the prison and the street merge into a shared carceral landscape.
THE LINE Cameron A. Granger, 2021, 7 min.
Using the history of Columbus' near east side and its people as an anchor, The Line is a film about Black migrations, urban development, and most of all, love.
Featuring the voices of: Ms. Aminah Robinson, Ms. Julialynne Walker, and Mr. William Richardson, with additional audio from WOSU's documentary on Columbus' Neighborhoods.
HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY Cameron A. Granger, 2020, 2 min.
Shot in my sublet in my downtown sublet during the summer 2020 uprisings. I wanted to dig myself in a hole so that no one could look at me ever again. I felt too seen, and that led to a visibility that felt like the walls closing in. So I tried to lay out a strategy for hiding oneself. A strategic invisibility.
ABOLITION AFFIRMATIONS 1 & 2 Saeedah Cook, 2021, 2 min.
”Hope is a discipline” – Mariam Kaba
