Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo / Movement letters
- Bert Stabler
- Jul 17
- 8 min read
On June 23 of this year, leftist activists who protested at an immigrant detention facility in Texas received decades-long sentences as a result of terrorism charges and sentence enhancements, in stark contrast to the fate of right-wing rioters who invaded the US Capitol in January 2021. Connections can be made between these Texas activists and that of the Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv (Socialist Patients’ Collective, or SPK), a group of anti-capitalist German asylum patients, similarly labeled as terrorists, who faced a heavily armed police crackdown 55 years ago in July of 1971. In their book Health Communism, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant describe right-wing claims around the SPK’s violent tactics as tenuous; the authors’ account of the group’s founding centers on the solidarity that the SPK sought to establish among all institutionalized patients, of all illnesses and disabilities, their promotion of universal access to competent care, and the equalized status they advocated between patients, doctors, and staff. An essential component of this effort was the sharing of information; “Their aim,” Bolton and Vierkant attest, “was the socialization of all knowledge, skills, and methods away from the false scandal of capitalist-oriented education.” While the SPK presented far from the only experiment in radical education during the period, the link between scientific and institutional authority was and remains perhaps nowhere more clear than in medical environments.
This spirit of sharing knowledge appears throughout the work of artist Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, particularly in a recent project entitled Steadfast Study. Following the influential discussion of “study” introduced by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in their 2013 text The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Branfman-Verissimo is interested not in conventional ideas of academic knowledge production, but instead, “work that may fall between the cracks, or an experience shared between two, held on the porch, or these intimate moments of organizing.” They continue, “Those, for me, are what make this work lifelong, and make this work integrated into our daily lives.” Steadfast Study includes an exhibition of the artist’s colorful expressionist text-based paintings, in the forms of wooden sandwich boards alongside large and works on paper, as well as a book designed by Emily Sara, who creates and archives disability media under the name Cripple. As in all their work, the show deals with themes of political and spiritual emancipation for Black and Brown, queer and trans, incarcerated, disabled, and oppressed people, with a sustained emphasis on the stories, demands and lives of the Palestinian people.
As vibrant, mesmerizing, and whimsical as the shapes, letters, patterns, and colors are in Branfman-Verissimo’s artistic messages, reiterating messages of love, hope, and solidarity, there are also elements of caution, anti-ableism, and melancholy. A formal feature of their work involves alternating between plainly readable text, text in which idiosyncratic spaces, line breaks, and mirrored and overlapped letter forms obscure the message, and text in which layered collaging demolishes all hope of interpretation. Hiding messages isn’t only a gesture of playful provocation for Branfman-Verissimo.
For the artist, this variation in intelligibility resonates with both the reflective and surreptitious aspects of emancipatory study. Commenting on the different levels of readability among their pieces, they say that they are “always trying to slow down the reader.”
In part because my processing brain is slow, but also because I believe that, in order to integrate this lifelong study within our work, we have to take the time to commit our understanding, and commit (to) our reading and our decoding.
The ambiguity and fecund polysemy of aesthetic text can remind neurotypical readers of different experiences of cognition, while also possibly training a more contemplative response, with value for careful and critical listening in group discussions. It’s not hard to then extrapolate that decisions around legibility can be tactical as well as aesthetic.
How can I use those forms as symbols, but not necessarily as the only way to understand? And so much of organizing work in this current state of utter fascism is coded, and is encrypted, and is happening offline, or is happening in spaces and where maybe the legibility has to look different, for safety and survival reasons.
Additionally, the emotional valence of this fugitive work reflects the larger context of repression and violence that make new creative tactics necessary.
This mural series that was made for Steadfast Study… It feels like making work during fascism is all about grief… The color palette in this mural series is quite limited, so it's less bright than my usual work, and that is in part because it felt like those are the only colors that could be used to tell these devastating stories and realities… I think allowing (viewers) to feel really devastated by this time (we’re living through) gives me a lot of medicine to make the work.
They spoke to me about the emotional fatigue engendered by repeating the same demands over time, from year to year and generation to generation, from returning land to Indigenous groups, including Palestinians, to ensuring safety and accessibility for all artists and viewers at galleries.
The Steadfast Study book is comprised of twenty-eight chapters, some of which include homework and other assignments, presented in the spirit of encouraging reflection, research, and dialogue rather than enduring quantified evaluations or pursuing credentials. “I think about pedagogy in all sorts of ways,” Branfman-Verissimo told me.
I think a lot about how (teaching) spaces are liberatory spaces to expand one’s mind and question everything around you. You know, sometimes my work is going to the studio and making a painting, and I also feel like going and spending time with my students and examining a text or making sense of this current time or a shared experience, it's often just as much the studio time for me. Just always constantly excited about the fact that we know so little, and we have so much to learn from each other.
Along with the many workshops and other events they facilitate, they teach at Bard College in upstate New York, as well as taking part in an experimental digitally-focused institution in New York City known as the School for Poetic Computation.
Branfman-Verissimo also told me about a political study group they started a year or so ago, in which the group is selecting and holding monthly discussions around books and other media. “If we're gonna be in this lifelong study together,” they told me, “we have to lean on each other, we have to invite each other to be in conversation in ways that we're used to, or ways that we're not used to.” Embracing these many contexts for reflective conversation among diverse gatherings is in keeping with a warmth conveyed by their visual work, in which words aren’t the only element of an expression, but also the tone and framing, incorporating empathy and intimacy as much as learning and debate.
Branfman-Verissimo finds textual sources for their work both in published writing and in personal conversations, in their own inner monologue and the public declarations of liberatory campaigns.
I'm kind of always skimming the world, and always making notes, and always sending voice memos to colleagues and comrades and friends, and my ears are always open, but not only through my ears, but also through my heart, and through, my feeling. (In) direct transcription forms, but also in thinking about, that really beautiful moment happened, that exchange in the garden happened where we both brought za'atar seeds, that is worth recording, too… I often also reference texts that came to me as a text that needed to be (made) widespread. There are a lot of demands over the last 3 years and over the last 78-plus years from occupied Palestine around boycotts. And so, in many ways, my work is this kind of vessel or microphone for those demands that are coming out.
In keeping with their affinity for public intimacy, the artist included a written series of correspondences with cultural worker, artist, publisher and writer Katie Giritlian as part of the Steadfast Study exhibition. Speaking about this volume, Branfman-Verissimo sees letter-writing as a particularly meaningful and potentially emancipatory form of communication.
Letter writing is such an important tactic, throughout liberatory struggles of different kinds, in terms of getting messaging and demands out of prisons, and out of sites where communication has to take a written form… Letter writing is a consistent practice of my own, and I know its importance in sustaining and being in conversation with organizers and activists that are locked up and targeted by the state, and how the simple form of pen on paper teaches us on the outside so much, and also keeps our folks inside up-to- date on what we are up to.
This ongoing interest is reflected in a letter-writing event for political prisoners that Branfman-Verissimo put together as part of the Steadfast Study exhibition. Together the participants wrote and sent over 30 letters to political prisoners all across this country, while surrounded by painted works that held demands, stories and chants about abolition, liberation and resistance.
Beyond these recent examples Branfman-Verissimo has a long and remarkable exhibition history, including a show in which their artwork appeared alongside the liberatory screen-printed text collages of Corita Kent, whose work they have also used as a teaching model for a public workshop and a book all about the viewfinder tool, published by Childish Press in 2021. They also travelled to study with Mary Ann Pettway and China Pettway of the legendary Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective. Both of these examples are useful reference points in considering Branfman-Verissimo’s work as connected to cultures of collective political struggle, communicating through bold visual expression that provokes both dialogue and contemplation. Along with their paintings, posters, prints, and publications, they have created memorable public art installations, including a mural that is still on display at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (managing to sidestep some censorship of pro-Palestinian voices within that institution), and a large video billboard on view for several months in West Hollywood, which displayed a continually-morphing animation of collaged text.
According to Demetrius Eudell and Carolyn Allen, the Jamaican philosopher, poet, and playwright Sylvia Wynter “often stated, quoting Aimé Césaire, that all her life she has been writing a single poem.” This echoes the way in which the consistency of Branfman-Verissimo’s practice transcends the many media, situations, and locations in which it has manifested. As described in manuel arturo abreu’s discussion of Wynter’s philosophical poetics, a rhythmic presence of oral performance can be sensed throughout the many iterations of Branfman-Verissimo’s visual speech. While Wynter did not directly comment on the experience of disability, many scholars have found openings to challenge Western definitions of able-bodiedness through her discussion of “genres of the human” that oppose a rigid normative European idea of “Man,” enforced through colonialism. “I have learned a lot from disabled elders, that it is us that writes the archive, because no one else will”, Branfman-Verissimo told me. And, to the extent some disabled communities overlook the intersectional histories that have made disability legible as a terrain of struggle, this is an archive we must return to continually.
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