About
The What Really Makes Us Safe? Project is a multimedia project created by Melanie Brazzell in collaboration with many others committed to a vision of safety that includes everyone. Understanding that police, prisons, and border regimes spread insecurity rather than safety, the goal of the project is to explore community-based alternatives to punishment, particularly for addressing gender-based violence. The U.S.-based aspect of the project involved interviews with transformative justice activists in North America as part of academic research. The German-based component brought this knowledge back to the Berlin communities where Melanie was working in the form of a university seminar, public events, workshops, an art exhibition, and a toolkit.
Logo
The project logo is a traditional German sewing box -- a symbol of positive safety as a toolbox of embodied skills and collective resources, in contrast to a negative vision of security based on borders and cages. Artist Andrea Marcos developed a linoleum cut print based on this idea, filling the sewing box with various symbols that represent sources of safety in our lives: lipstick for desire and gender play, a permanent residency visa for the right to safe refuge and migration, a phone to show connection to others (regardless of where they are in the world)... We chose a sewing box, traditionally gendered feminine, rather than a masculine toolbox to show off our queer-feminist angles.