The Avery Review stands with all those fighting, organizing, teaching, and writing for abolition—and, in architecture, with all those working against the white supremacy, settler colonialism, ableism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy upheld in and by our field. BLACK LIVES MATTER.

As Angela Davis recently reminded listeners on Democracy Now!, abolition “is not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of, but it’s about re-envisioning. It’s about building anew.” As a journal dedicated to decentering the objects, histories, and authors of architecture, we are committed (and will continue to recommit) to publishing essays that propose radical changes to the current order of things, and to amplifying the work of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) who offer a way forward in this re-building.

Issue 53 gathers essays that parse certain racial, colonial, infrastructural, and cultural imaginations as they consolidate power across ideological and physical terrains: from East to West, left to right, land to water, solid to gas. Alexander Arroyo replots the playmaking of American empire through a global race war game; Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon thaws settler colonial earth-writing in the Arctic; Elise Misao Hunchuck, Marco Ferrari & Jingru (Cyan) Cheng orbit China’s Sky River Project to tell a different hydro-geographic story; and V. Mitch McEwen reads the middle in Keller Easterling’s Medium Design in order to work on an antiBlack world.

Our mission has been (and will always be) a work in progress, with far more to be done and undone, learned and unlearned, and we invite you to join us in this work with your participation, suggestions, and submissions (editors@averyreview.com).