Public Opening Launch of The Borough Based Liberation Project

The Borough Based Liberation Project is a series of neighborhood cultural events and interventions to collectively vision abolition, climate justice, migrant justice, and housing futures in New York City. For the month of September, the project will activate this storefront to serve as a centralized hub for our organizing. As communities converge, learn, and share together, Chinatown Art Brigade will co-create an intersectional space that connects our local and global struggles to build solidarity and power. The projects Abolitionist Futures theme will spotlight local resistance and link struggles for liberation from NYC to Palestine to indigenous territories in Abya Yala through art workshops, exhibitions, teach-ins, gatherings, performances, and celebrations.

Chinatown has always been a site of resilience and resistance. For the past several years, there has been a growing grassroots abolitionist movement against the citys Borough-Based Jails plan set to expand NYCs carceral facilities with four new jails at the cost of $15 billion. Adjacent to this building is the site of the new Chinatown jail, set to become the tallest jail in the world. When we fight for Chinatown, we must know and celebrate the generations of dissenters and stewards that came before us. We seek to share stories from some of these movements and to imagine and grow structures of accountability and community justice within our intersecting struggles.

The artists hope this project will provide communities with a nexus to oppose the political and economic forces that threaten to displacement, even as funding for cages, policing, deportation, resource extraction, and war increases rampantly. They hope to encourage community members to join abolitionist struggles that oppose increased policing, new and old jails, prisons, and detention centers, prevent extraction in indigenous territories, and support Palestinian liberation.

The Borough-based Liberation Project (BBLP) is a riff off of the Borough Based Jail Community Construction Office which is the community engagement office for the new Chinatown jailscraper located at 110 Walker Street. Our BBLP will be activated at 127 Walker Street. The project will be located around the corner from the new jail site in which there is growing grassroots community resistance and opposition to, and in fact the back wall of the space shares a wall with the new jail.

This month-long series is facilitated by the Borough Based Liberation Project, Chinatown Art Brigade, the W.O.W. Project, Black Indigenous Liberation Movement, and Dandelions NYC in collaboration with Lavender Phoenix, Asians 4 Palestine, Protect Sunset Park, LEGAIA, Cal Hsiao, Tif Ng, Sonia Tsan, Chris Deng, Tania Mattos, Sunnie Liu, Malaika Temba, Louise Yeung, Daphne Lundi, Megan Hattie Stahl, Black and Pink, Ashiñwaka Sapara Women’s Association (Ecuador), MIX NYC and many others. Space generously provided by Immigrant Social Services’ Storefront for Ideas.

*space provided by Immigrant Social Services Storefront for Ideas

Visit the website at:
https://www.chinatownartbrigade.org/events

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@chinatownartbrigade
@wowprojectnyc