From PHLASSEMBLED, a public project that tells a story of active resistance and radical community building through the personal and collective narratives that make up Philadelphia's changing urban fabric. These two pillows document the planning and formation of the public site "Freedom in a Carceral State", the second pillow shows the culminating labyrinth walk, "Memorial to Loss".
"Carceral State is a physical and mental systemic process exercized by a government where groups, class or race of people are deliberately excluded, disenfranchised and alienated from any form of fair and equal political, economic and other powers. Many source of data has been gathered showing the disproportionality of African Americans incarcerated in the US penal institutions. However, in defining carceral state we are recognizing that it is an elusion that we all are not incarcerated. Hence, our communities are occupied by the police which is the same as the military, our homelands are being gentrified and through the education system our children continue to be fed a historical and colonizing narrative. When we make the connection between the world's refugee situations, the ban on immigration and the build up of the prison industrial complex, we begin to acknowledge and resist what is becoming a global apartheid system".
William Goldsby