Bring Down The Walls looks at the prison industrial complex through the lens of house music and nightlife, proposing the dance floor as a space of personal and collective liberation. The connection between a system that locks the body up and music that sets it free comes from the years in which the artist Phil Collins worked with a group of men incarcerated at Sing Sing, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. Structured around the formation of an unofficial music band, these collaborative sessions repeatedly turned to a canon of dance music that was a shared formative influence for everyone in the room. House music emerged in the mid-1980s from queer, Black, Latinx communities embattled by oppressive law enforcement policies and the escalation of mass incarceration. Taking the form of a communal space dedicated to the struggle for social justice and prison abolition, Bring Down The Walls reflected a coexistence of two fields of knowledge – one born out of education, advocacy and activism, the other through sharing time, space and energy – imagining new ways in which we could advance the argument against the prison industrial complex.

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