WHAT IS FREE STRATA?

Free Strata is a public curation firm committed to bringing about change within the American (in)criminal justice system through the Arts. Established by Cait Campbell in 2022, the organization derives its name from study of geological stratigraphy wherein the stratum of carcerality in America’s history has led us to unprecedented states of mass incarceration, rendering visible the many residues of slavery, myriad forms of racial violence and systems of racialized, inter-generational, oppression against Black Bodies and People of Color throughout this country’s collaged history. This body of work begins to unearth this compounded material through the development of an expansive prison abolition framework spanning distinct moments of carceral intervention.

FreeStrata Projects has been undertaken to better comprehend the ways in which the experience of imprisonment and marginalization can be reimagined to produce meaningful modes of visual storytelling and re-navigate the systems in which incarcerated bodies have been born, bred, and produced since the initial traverse of African slaves during the Middle Passage, and even prior, upon initial contact with Indigenous groups here (FreeStrata sits on traditional Lenni-Lenape land  https://native-land.ca/ ).

Free Strata introduces a unified model to define the praxis of prison abolitionism in America today, embedding practices of historical storytelling, aesthetic liberation, community building, and Afro- connection. It is about creating imagined and physical realms where crime and punishment are not solely about culpability for ones’ actions but accountability for ones’ future and ones’ past…

Responding to the unavoidable fact that the incarcerated population in this country has steadily risen 500% since the 1980s, with the massive expansion of the Prison Industrial Complex, a system that boasts the largest globally, with population well-surpassing 2million men, women and youths, coast to coast, border to border, incarcerated in some form of federal and/or state-sanctioned order.

IT’S NOT GOING TO BE EASY, BUT WE HOPE YOU WILL JOIN US <3…