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My hope is that, as you listen to these voices, observe these pieces, and experience this art, you will TAKE NOTES on the truths that folks are telling and the ideas they generously share about how to build spaces and processes for healing. The answers, the solutions that we claim to be searching for, are right here. They are known and understood and practiced EVERY DAY by folks who have had to figure these things out by necessity, from everything they’re dealing with. But that’s never where we as a society go to find them – we worship politicians, we worship celebrities, we listen to policymakers – but we don’t listen to the youth, we don’t listen to the incarcerated, we don’t listen to the folks who have actually been through all the stuff that we claim to want to solve.

This project also tries to approach many interlocking issues and realities at the same time – because I believe very strongly that it’s all tied together! We can’t solve one thing without actually dealing with how all these structural violences are interconnected. Policing is connected to incarceration, is connected to detention, is connected to surveillance, is connected to gentrification, is connected to capitalism, is connected to violence, is connected to loss, is connected to grief, is connected to hurt. And the same goes for solutions; they have to be wide-ranging and link many things together in order to truly have lasting effects.

I think what folks are dealing with on a daily basis, and how our society doesn’t honor and admit this, or make space for it - is something that can only truly be reflected through direct testimony and through art. Seeing how the entire history of popular American media is built around stereotyping black & brown & poor people, and criminalizing and dehumanizing them, this project is built as an offering, a counter-narrative to that – and in so doing, I’m not trying to hero-ize anybody; I’m trying to SHOW THAT EVERYONE IS COMPLEX AND HUMAN AND MULTIDIMENSIONAL; that every single one of us has every type of emotion and character inside of us! I want to destroy the binary of good and bad. This is not a project about innocence! It is a project about messiness, about mistakes, about process, about being a full person, and about reckoning with what has happened to you and what you have done and where all of it comes from.

This project is built to tear down the stereotypes about incarcerated people, the lies that say they’re not brilliant and creative, that they’re isolated from the world of ideas, that they’re not kind and gentle and loving, or that they’re unfeeling. It also shows how people change over time – and how we have to make room for those changes, and for understanding where folks are at. Some people in our society are allowed to do that, while others are punished for the decisions they make before they’ve been allowed to change and grow and bloom.

This is also fundamentally an abolitionist project. I believe deeply in the abolition of the entire prison industrial complex and of racial capitalism, and I believe deeply in revolution over reform. Through these pieces I seek to condemn the policies. practices, and structures (both physical & ideological) of this nation. I hope this project can contribute to the ongoing struggle towards an abolitionist future. I thank Mariame Kaba, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Robin DG Kelley and Cedric Robinson for their daily inspiration and teachings in these areas.

This is a COMMUNITY project - between all the folks that told their stories and worked on the pieces, over 150 total collaborators gave of themselves for this project. It is 1000% as much their project as it is mine.

Lastly, I want to dedicate this work to several folks who have passed on since I started this project, and who I hope to especially honor through it:

Lawrence Dahu Harris

Sharen Hewitt

Daisy Newman

Nipsey Hussle

Greg Tate

bell hooks

with love,

-Samora