Re/Creation

At its beating heart, Re/Creation is about using art and storytelling to recreate the lives of justice-affected people. The central organizing principle of Re/Creation is to create and present stories and artwork from the point of view of the incarcerated in political and historical context, finding outlets for incarcerated and reentering citizens’ ideas and narratives. Also inherent in the name is the central human impulse in creation to play, with forms and with each other, a central method toward personal agency. Media can include the written word, oral narrative, and video journaling, in any combination that suits an individual or group project.

 

The project developed organically out of interrelated workshops and publications facilitated or co-facilitated by writer and justice reform activist John Proctor. Re/Creation is both 1) a service organization providing a pipeline to positive direction and self-actualization for people at different stages of incarceration, reentry, and recovery and 2) a hub for publication of work developed in opposition to the American carceral apparatus.

Following are the components of Re/Creation in the their current form:

 

We currently have a thriving community of workshops, including Creation Fridays, an arts and oral history workshop at the North Infirmary Command (NIC) facility on Rikers Island and a re-entry writing workshop at Restoration Plaza in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. We have our first public reading at Restoration Plaza planned for May, though that may need to be rearranged with the public outbreak.

 
Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus

For the past year John has written and distributed a MailChimp newsletter called Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus, which has enumerated his experiences and challenges building and operating the series of initiatives that have come to comprise Re/Creation. In doing so, he’s also brought and together and amplified a group of advocates, educators, and allies, whom he’s kept engaged both in the challenges inherent in building a life post-incarceration and in the larger issues shaping those challenges. 

The visual image here is the artwork of Antonio Battle, one of our longtime reentering artist/storytellers, used with his permission.