Bring Down The Walls (2020) by Phil Collins

Originating as a three-part public art project, Bring Down The Walls looks at the prison industrial complex in the US through the lens of house music and nightlife. The connection between a system that locks the body up and music that sets it free comes from the years in which 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 band, sessions repeatedly turned to a canon of dance floor anthems that were a shared formative influence for both the band members and the filmmaker. Deepening this aspect is the historical context of the 1980s, in which the exponential rise in mass incarceration coincided with a new dance sound emerging from communities embattled by the criminal law policies.

Reflecting a coexistence of two structures of knowledge, the political/academic and the physical/experiential—one born out of education, advocacy and activism, and the other through sharing time, space and energy—Bring Down The Walls proposes the dance floor as a real and metaphorical space of personal and collective liberation, and new ways in which we could come together as a society.