Abolish prisons to create other worlds

We are interested in bringing the record of practices that traverse contemporary artistic endeavors, which is why we invited the YoNoFui Popular Collective to share Marginalia 99 from the perspective of pedagogy and the provocation of anti-punitive and anti-prison imaginaries.

The right wing in Latin America has been organizing power through the financialization of life and concentrated capital; today it governs through democracy. As is happening in our country, the idea of terrorism has been reintroduced to create various renewed profiles of internal enemies. This time, the internal enemies are all those who disrupt the flow of the free market. Let us not forget that the market is, among other things, cultural. The government is waging what they call a “cultural battle,” and some say these battles are distractions from what is really happening: the impoverishment of the population is reaching unprecedented peaks. It hasn’t been long since we understood that the cultural politics of our emotions is part of the same economic war and not a separate issue. These are wars that overlap and complement each other.

We are the death of morality, we are the guerrilla of sexual subversion

Currently, the social fabrics are breaking down at an astonishing speed, to the point where this government finds some legitimacy in threatening to return delegated powers to the armed forces, allowing them to intervene in cases of internal security—a practice that was eradicated after the last civic-ecclesiastical-military dictatorship. The plan, in alliance with the United States, to Bukelize the region is underway.

We believe it is necessary to act and move the fabrics that are unraveling. To do so with concrete actions like those on March 8 and March 24: two marches in which we took to the streets with the Columna Mostri, a convergence of activist collectives that identify as Mostris, thereby expanding the identity spectrum of feminisms and also of human rights. On March 24, National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice, we entered Plaza de Mayo with looks of complicity, shouting: “We are the death of morality, we are the guerrilla of sexual subversion.”

As a collective, YoNoFui has 22 years of history, going through many contexts and governments together. We were born in Ezeiza prison with a poetry workshop. In times like these, where everything becomes more complex with governments that promote individualism and distrust, forming a collective is a way of sustaining what they want to make disappear.

After the pandemic, due to the emergence of multiple situations of discomfort and suffering, we formalized our Mental Health space, inviting us to think about this topic with all the complexity it entails and with the help of people who work on it. This area of action is now organized into two groups: Affects and Collective Care, which are therapeutic spaces without hierarchies, peer groups, and mutual support where experience and listening prevail. We are a collective that, both in our pedagogical spaces, in street demonstrations, and in our collective meetings, tries to create a non-homogeneous common that allows us to transform life, create a world, and inhabit it among differences. We believe this is a gesture toward collective mental health; we do not refer to hegemonic mental health that prioritizes mandates of happiness and well-being. Rather, it is about sharing sufferings, sadness, mysteries, joys, and more to collectivize emotional strategies in a context that tries to break them.

At the end of 2023, a week after Javier Milei won the elections, we held Alternative Justice, an International Anti-Punitive and Penal Abolitionist Meeting, which lasted three days. The first was a festival called Anti-Punitive Sentiments; we gathered at the door of our collective house, set up a stage, danced, and opened the meeting with a Performative Plea called Trial to Justice. We also inaugurated the first Anti-Prison and Penal Abolitionist Library. The second day was called Abolitionist Affects, featuring three workshops and a discussion at a queer theater in Buenos Aires. Finally, we held the II Parliament of Thieves and Deviants, a large meeting that lasted six hours where we invited close individuals to speak about Penal Abolitionism and Alternative Justice. This meeting, attended by activists, artists, sex workers, disabled people, queers, people deprived of liberty, communicators, journalists, teachers from various places, allowed us to continue amplifying and collectively creating an anti-punitive Sudaka language to expand political imagination and shape alternative justice practices.

This year, driven by the momentum of the Meeting, we launched our YoNoFui School, Arts, Crafts, and Political Experimentation, a project that allows us to materialize a learning journey that is open and free for those who want to resonate with our practices. Since our beginnings, we have had pedagogical practices more related to artistic workshops and political experimentation spaces outside traditional institutions because we believe it is necessary to flip the hierarchies created within the classroom and assume that everyone has knowledge to share. To this end, we create a mix of teachers who are political friends and close alliances of activists, artists, teachers, sex workers, disabled people, mental health workers, and more. We believe these spaces are fundamental because they encourage collective transformation.

YoNoFui is an Anti-Punitive, Penal Abolitionist, Anti-Prison, and Anti-Fascist collective; these categories are not mere labels for us but the result of navigating heterogeneous contexts and daily practices. Punitive culture is a way of living, organizing ideas, and connecting. It is an effect, a form of social composition and adhesion that configures our relationships in everyday life, provoking distrust and marking others as potential threats. It is one of the favorite pedagogies of integrated global capitalism to govern us; therefore, sustaining ourselves collectively is a common practice against the extermination of our ways of life. Abolishing prisons and punitive culture to make this world a habitable one.