EVENTS CALENDAR
While we are in transition and searching for a stable home base, we will continue to produce events with some of our neighborhood partners.
The AltLib Popup Series will present roving events to continue supporting expansive art projects and dig deep for uncommon cultural exchanges. If you’re interested in setting up a show with us, please read our booking page and send us an e-mail.
- This event has passed.
Letters to Prisoners
June 4, 2021 @ 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
No backyard concert this week, but we hope you’ll join us for a prisoner solidarity event! We will gather in the backyard for a kind of info session about political prisoners in the US and then break out to write letters to incarcerated people.
We have assembled some information and correspondence with specific prisoners, and we will provide pens, paper, and envelopes! We will also have a limited number of stamps on hand 😉
The following writing is taken from June11.org :::
Against another year of state encroachment, against the restriction of free movement under the auspices of “safety,” against the continued brutalization of our friends in prison, we embrace solidarity on June 11, 2021: International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason & All Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners. Through our letters, demonstrations and solidarity attacks we keep the beacon lit for those who have given years of their lives for their conviction that the State is a horror against which we must wager our lives.
The architects of prison society would have prison function as a memory hole, casting our dear rebels into the void and producing in free souls a stifling amnesia. They want us to forget those who took action against the state and economy and those who continue their rebellion behind bars. Our work of solidarity with imprisoned anarchists is a hammer blow against forgetting: against the prison walls and the narcotizing technological society that shatters all meaning.
Prison administrations around the world have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by implementing lockdowns and banning in-person visits, building upon prior movement to replace face-to-face visits with video chat. Physical mail is also threatened, with the United States federal prison system initiating a program to scan letters and make them only accessible on expensive tablets provided by a contracted company, Smart Communications. It’s likely that this trend will continue in prisons around the world. With the pandemic as an alibi, prison administrations and profiteering companies have accelerated the abolition of direct human connection.
This year, we seek to deepen the connection between different aspects of anti-repression, to bring the names and the wisdom of our long-term prisoners into current struggles – whether that’s in the streets against the police, in the forest against pipelines, or in the night against monuments of power – and strengthen networks and practices to support more comrades going to prison.