The eternal network*
If there is one thing that I’ve been effortlessly doing since ever is writing and sending letters. Addressed to entities, family, friends, acquaintances, lovers and crushes, as well as strangers; by hand, by mysterious means, but above all through the postal services, both nationally and internationally. Hardly ever worrying about a reply. Not for all the time, but always coming back as water rushing violently in a creek on dried-up land, my words raining in cascades or more sparsely, with or without additions, glue, volumes and juxtapositions, rarely in a blank envelope, never with a postage franking label, but stamps, yes, and stamping, the more the better. It’s becoming tricky to freely pick them lately, beautiful coloured stamps instead of sticky white labels with a simple monetary value black-printed on them, very likely creating an argument at the privatized post office every time the stock runs out. For in the antipodes of the speed to which humanity has been subjected, critical thinking, creativity and all things freedom and democracy are also at risk - or perhaps very much so, because of this very subjection without plea or aggravation.
It seems that in Finland the majority of the population communicates privately and officially by digital means entirely, so the national postal service is doing away with stamps and letters, limiting itself to parcels that consumerism can't do without and labels that standardisation demands. I can't say that the idea is surprising to any regular at a post office counter anywhere - it is simply the law of supply and demand savagely applied to each and every human activity, however innate it may be to community life itself, such as private and uncensored communication. But it is still wildly uncivilized for, as far as I know, an otherwise sophisticated country. The first one in Europe to grant women the right to vote, by 1906. But then again, anything moving towards technological innovation amounts to progress these days.
I'm an actress who doesn't go to castings, a playwright who doesn't apply for neither awards nor publications, a director who doesn't fill in application forms based on budgets or calculated agreements and I'm definitely not a visual artist. I just like brushes, paints and textures, now I've started incorporating natural elements into my amateur collages. I've been opting out of the semi-analogue photo camera for the instant shots on my smartphone, which is just over a year old, and I'm not the least bit proud of it. Even so, framing, movement, sound and words in space, intimacy, reflections and impressions are the most fluent syntax at my disposal. I am and will remain a letter writer, unaware until a while back that what I have been doing for decades without documenting or cataloguing is called mail art. I've sent two submissions to mail art calls in the past five years and for many more I've lost the pen pals whose addresses were given to me through youth books’ clubs. I had become so used to sending art with barely any return that it wasn't until very recently, when I was again looking for reasons not to completely disconnect from the few social networks I still frequent for the sake of a cultural and ecological association's work, that in the midst of my recent isolation in the countryside, I came across dozens of groups of mail artists and mail art catalogues or new international open calls. So I'm happily taking baby steps into this path of actual exchange, no matter how much the plague of competition and professional curation may suffocate art itself. It is still very much worth staying in touch with the possibility of transcendence.
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