Letters from the Etui is a digital platform featuring an animated video series, texts, and an accompanying series of workshops that support abolitionist frameworks, from personal to political practice. An etui — from the Old French estui, meaning prison — is a small ornamental case used for holding needles, cosmetics, and often other sacred possessions like personal letters.
The project blends these meanings offering the etui as a metaphor for holding the sacredness and value of the people, ideas, creativity, and relationships impacted by imprisonment, and rejecting the sense of disposability that prisons support in our culture at large. Here, letters serve to connect students to each other across the walls of the prison system, they connect resistance struggles around the world, and they connect us as citizens and activists to a world oriented towards abolition.
This video series was developed through a collaboration led by Dr. Kamran Afary, with Professor Zachary Zezima’s students in his Cal State LA Animation Option class, and Dr. Kamran Afary and the Communication Studies students at Lancaster State Prison. Each film is a letter that utilizes the writing and narration of incarcerated students — responses to prompts on different aspects of interpersonal communication — in conjunction with animation to illuminate and visually represent the inner and outer lives of those within the prison system.
The animation majors selected writings that most resonated with them and then spent an entire semester creating these short animations in Prof Zach Zezima’s class. As Dr. Kamran Afary describes, the project and collaboration aims to symbolically demolish the prison walls, abolish the conditions of isolation, and establish deeper love and connection.
Also included in the project is a letter written by Golrokh Iraee, an Iranian writer who has been imprisoned since October 2016, for an unpublished story she penned against the barbaric practice of stoning. During her years in prison, Iraee has continued to express her views through open letters smuggled out for publication. In the letter she scathingly opposes the Islamic Republic and expresses solidarity with Kurdish political prisoner, Zeinab Jalalian as well as others.
Click here to watch Letters From the Etui.
Brianna Mims is a movement artist, facilitator, and abolitionist. She studied Dance and NGOs and Social Change at the University of Southern California. She currently works for Californians United for a Responsible Budget.
Georgina Grkikian is an artist studying Architecture and Photography at the University of Southern California, working at the intersection of Art, Installations and Architecture.
Minh Hân Vu is a multimedia artist and student of architecture at the University of Southern California with a minor in law and public policy.
Kamran Afary, PhD, RDT, NT teaches Communication Studies at Cal State LA and in Lancaster Prison. He is co-editor of Communication Research on Expressive Arts and Narrative as Forms of Healing (2020) and co-author of Iranian Diaspora Identities: Stories and Songs (2020). He also offers training workshops in Narradrama at the Drama Therapy Institute of Los Angeles.