PUBLIC PROGRAM for Absolute Memory: An Archive of Softness

Letter Writing with Survived & Punished

This program is hosted as a part of the exhibition Absolute Memory: An Archive of Softness at the Wattis, on view through May 18, 2024. As a part of the exhibition, we will host a letter-writing event for incarcerated survivors that draws attention to the lived experience of incarcerated survivors in California prisons, and seeks to soften the hardness of the carceral system. Working with Survived & Punished, a grass-roots organization with Bay Area presence dedicated to the defense and care of people imprisoned after surviving domestic violence, this collective letter-writing event on April 27 aims to usher softness into mutuality through the power of interpersonal connection. With this event, the curators hope to highlight the soft effect of shared space and shared relationships in contrast to the hardness of the prison system. Through finding the gentleness and resilience in shared humanity, we are reminded that any system can be dismantled.

In collaboration with CCA Graduate Design student Cole Ryder, 3 unique cards for letter writing will be commissioned for the event, and will have a dedicated space in the exhibition’s Reading Room for sustained engagement. During the event, participants will have the opportunity to be guided and to learn more about carceral dismantling from an individual and community-based lens from Survived & Punished representative Neda Said.

Guiding question: How can resilience be soft?

About Survived & Punished:
“Our coalition of freedom campaigns and organizations believes that policing, immigration enforcement and the prison industrial complex are violent institutions that primarily target poor communities of color. They are fundamentally racist, anti-family, anti-trans/queer, anti-woman, anti-Black, anti-Native, anti-poor and anti-immigrant…It is in this context that self-defense and other survival actions are often criminalized.”
– “Analysis,” Survived & Punished