The prison—in its wide range of figurative, philosophical, societal, and material configurations—exists in a state of ambiguity. In many ways, this condition is reflected in Jeremy Bentham’s vision of the Panopticon, a design conceived as a less expensive alternative to pre-existing prison structures. With its sweeping vantage points, the complex required fewer staff to surveil it, effectively removing the human component from the practice of carceral control—the individual who might bear witness to the conditions of the prison system, those interpolated within it, or the ghost in the machine. This removal is indicative of a larger, persistent issue that tends to curtail questions of abolition: many of us cannot imagine our lives, our society, without prisons—at the same time, we can’t quite conceive of their true nature.

Activist Angela Davis reflects on this duality:

The perceived unreality of the carceral system—and by extension, our inability to move toward or imagine a world beyond it—is in many ways tied to the conscious repression of the incarcerated person, the living breathing human body that moves within prison walls. Mindful of this blind spot, one might ask how we envision prisons apart from the media, apart from cheat shots in television shows and movies that distort our perspective of their spatial constrictions. This essay is a means of working through the tension between the perceived and repressed realities of the prison system through a focus on artists with performance and movement-based practices. It is not meant to offer an exhaustive representation or imagining of these artists’ practices, but to showcase instances in which movement can be used to draw our attention to the physicality of confinement, and, moreover, the felt experience of carceral infrastructures. To consider an aesthetic of abolition, let us consider how spaces of confinement are built to both respond to and countervail an individual’s movement—how the imposition of physical and psychological limitations can be identified and rethought, and how abolition might be embodied through a multiplicity of experiences.

A growing body of scholarship demonstrates the lineage between the social, political, and economic conditions of the plantation and that of the prison system as we know it today. This connection permeates the ways in which each respective system is or has historically been perceived—as a condition without end—as well as how individual bodies are subsumed into these spaces through mandatory labor or regulated activities. Davis observes:

The notion of “vagrancy” used to describe enslaved people was similarly ascribed to the colonized body, which was often equated with immorality, disorder, corruption—a problem in need of “correction.” Colonial architectures addressed this perceived problem head on; pre-dating the Panopticon, colonial infrastructures, built on top of indigenous land, emphasized clear sightlines. This eliminated spaces in which the colonized could gather clandestinely or, in essence, move freely. 

The boundary between the colonizer and the colonized, the enslaver and the enslaved, the imprisoner and the imprisoned, is made more visible through the construction of otherness. The racialized conditions of chattel slavery in the United States developed long after the advent of slavery itself, though the entanglement between race and enslavement is continuously present in the false equivalency drawn between Blackness and criminality, as well as other forms of otherness, including sexuality, gender, disability, and neurodivergence. The tether between colonialism, the plantation, and the prison is made clear through the latter’s ostensible aim at “correcting” criminal bodies through segregative subjugation. “[W]ith the penitentiary,” Davis writes, “incarceration became the punishment itself. As is indicated in the designation ‘penitentiary,’ imprisonment was regarded as rehabilitative and the penitentiary prison was devised to provide convicts with the conditions for reflecting on their crimes and, through penitence, for reshaping their habits and even their souls” (Davis 2003, 26). 

Lu Lee, a former enslaved woman and midwife living in the eighteenth century, described how her owner would encourage the enslaved to have dance parties on Saturday nights, an “innocent” and regulated diversion from the realities of subjugation. ¹ As Saidiya Hartman describes, “Generally, the response of the enslaved to the management and orchestration of ‘Negro enjoyment’ was more complex than a simple rejection of ‘innocent amusement.’ Rather, the sense of operating within and against these closures made the experience of pleasure decidedly ambivalent. If ‘good times’ were an index of the owner’s profit and dominion, what possibilities could pleasure yield?” (Hartman 1997, 49) Pushing back against such prescribed movements, enslaved people found other opportunities for amusement, pleasure, anger, and joy, finding spaces where they could gather, speak, and move with relative agency outside of the master’s gaze. Documented in (auto)biographies, diaries, and travel accounts, this negation took several forms, from slowing down work to destroying property. ² “Within the confines of surveillance and nonautonomy,” Hartman writes, “the resistance to subjugation proceeded by stealth: one acted furtively, secretly, and imperceptibly, and the enslaved seized any and every opportunity to slip off the yoke” (Hartman 2003, 49).

Consider Harriet Jacobs’ “loophole of retreat”—her seven-year confinement in a crawl space in her grandmother’s home, as documented in her novel Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. From here, she peered out onto the world in fragments—a passerby, a sliver of sunlight, her children playing, unaware of her presence. These fleeting moments of reprieve did not offer her a means of spatial escape from the plantation, but an alternative means of navigating its confinement; her escape was psychological rather than physical, a chosen path for living within the boundaries that were imposed on her. In undermining permissible actions, moving beyond and around prescribed boundaries has long been an everyday form of abolitionist practice.

Using Lee’s and Jacobs’ examples, imagine what forms of movement and embodiment might similarly enact these loopholes.

How can we understand abolition from a spatial perspective?

Artist Anna Martine Whitehead’s installation and dance lecture Notes on Territory: Meditation 1 replicates the dimensions of Jacobs' crawl space (7 x 9 x 3 feet). In this space, as Whitehead observes, Jacobs was effectively no longer a slave but in a liminal state between enslavement, fugitivity, and freedom. Staged in Chicago’s Roman Susan gallery, Whitehead’s crawl space oscillated between a library, an interactive installation, and a place for durational performance and rest (Whitehead 2022). Through “somatic solidarity,” Whitehead considers how we define freedom in its most intrinsic form—how feelings of hope, progress, excitement, and change render a confined environment inhabitable (Whitehead 2023). ³

How does the incarcerated body similarly find moments of reprieve? Historian Dianne Harris recounts an experience visiting a group of incarcerated students enrolled in the Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, where one of the students recalled the impact of reading Plato’s Allegory of the Cave during his sentence (Harris 2021, 112). Plato’s story describes a group of people who have been chained to the wall of a cave. They lived their entire lives here; their only portal to a life beyond the cave stems from observing their shadows dancing across the wall, projected from a fire burning behind them. They attribute names to these shadows, a type of world-building born out of confinement. The student at Sing Sing, as told by Harris, used the story as a framework to imagine a world outside of his cell, using his own shadow as an avatar, one that could move freely while his physical body could not (Harris 2021). As in Plato’s allegory, the shadows become a portal, representing not the world itself, but an alternate, perhaps parallel, version of it; a loophole.

Since 2016, choreographer and educator Suchi Branfman has directed “Dancing Through Prison Walls,” a project that brings together incarcerated and formerly incarcerated dancers, choreographers, artists, and performers into critical dialogue on the ways dance offers a means of surviving the restriction of freedom, movement, and liberty. The project started during a five-year choreographic residency at the California Rehabilitation Center, a medium-security state prison in Norco, California. It came to an abrupt halt in March 2020 in the wake of COVID-19, when California state prisons closed. As a response, the project changed course—the incarcerated dancers began writing choreographic scores to send to dancers on the outside, creating a collaboration that traverses architectures of confinement and restriction. ⁴

One of the choreographed dances, a duet written by Brandon Alexander, draws upon the dancer’s reflection, casting it as an antagonist partner:

In this routine, the reflection, another guise of the shadow, offers a means of working through conflict, while other dances in the project allow for moments of joy, frustration, pleasure, ritual, meditation, each written for a counterpart in the outside world. (Yet here, inside-outside no longer functions as a binary.)

Contemporary artist Torkwase Dyson’s practice concerns the lived implications of brute infrastructures. Her large-scale sculptures reference the restrictive, imposing nature of modernist aesthetics, revealing the antagonistic relationship of these forms with the body and the structural, environmental violence they engender. Dyson refers to this work as Black Compositional Thought, “a working term that considers how paths, throughways, waterways, architecture, objects, and geographies are composed by [B]lack bodies, and then how additional properties of energy, space, scale, and sound all work together in networks of liberation.” ⁵ For her project I Can Drink the Distance: Plantationocene in 2 Acts, Dyson considers the Anthropocene’s connection to racism, the plantation, white supremacy, and their manifestations in industrialization—an intersection referred to as the “Plantationocene.” With her signature black, monolithic-like forms, Dyson staged a series of performances with the sculpture and fellow artists over two evenings at New York’s Pace Gallery, activating the sculptures’ spatial dimensions and unfixing their geographical imposition through the poetic movement and presence of Black bodies. In doing so, Dyson sought to restructure the equivalency between Blackness and freedom: “To image and imagine movements and geographies of freedom, known and unknown, is to regard this space as irreducible, or to regard black spatial movement as irreducible.” ⁶

There are many ways of capturing the spatial relationship between the body and the carceral structures, which manifests in not only physical, but mental, audial, ephemeral, and environmental dimensions. Color, for instance, can be situated at the heart of a matter, bringing the question of carcerality to the very real, readily felt place of the body. Artist Sable Elyse Smith, for instance, uses the color blue to denote police presence and the use of (thin) blue lines to demarcate spaces of restricted movement, an observation that stemmed from visiting her father in prison for two decades. ⁷ I have had conversations with artist Sara Jimenez about the topic of carceral aesthetics. Much of her work incorporates a signature reddish-pink hue inspired by “prison pink,” a particular pigment that was developed in the late 1960s following research on psychological and physiological responses to the color pink. The color was observed to temporarily reduce aggressive behavior and became popular in correctional facilities. This notion demonstrates just one of the ways in which architectures of confinement go beyond the physical walls themselves to permeate psychological spaces, creating an unreality.

Imagine the space of confinement as an echo of the human form—how the walls might breathe, shudder, contract, expand, whether through bars, bricks, glass, gates, or borders. This focus on the entwined relationship between the bodily, the spatial, and the built environment is necessary in making space for abolition, for imagining a world beyond prisons, where rehabilitation replaces psychosocial punishment. The question I have posed, “How can we understand abolition through a spatial perspective?” might be better formulated “How can we imagine an abolitionist aesthetics without fugitive understanding?”

Let’s end where Jacobs ends: