Reverse Side

2024-work in progress

My starting point became crisis of humans, social atomization, and complex external events, which I contrast with a sense of unity with others. Drawing on the tradition of gift-giving, I focus on a universal and everyday object—the postcard—which becomes a collective image of people’s sensory experiences, collective memory, and the interconnectedness of times. I also focus on everyday text.

In secondhand shops, I looked for postcards with handwritten texts and then appropriated other people’s experiences through collages. This is how the shift happened: from private messages, postcards moved into the category of the common, accessible to viewers. I found mostly old postcards, some with dates on them: 1974, 1990, 2000. But even in the absence of dates, the meanings remain clear from the context. After all, at all times people experience the same feelings, face the same problems, watch similar external events. The variations are different, but the core remains. Such postcards are artifacts of means of communication, because through them people not only congratulated each other on holidays but also communicated at a distance.

As I read the postcards, it was as if I were experiencing what these strangers were experiencing. The enthusiastic tone of the wishes put me in a kind of postcard trance. The effect was like being covered with a warm blanket sewn from the remnants of other people’s messages. This is how the feeling of oneness with other people works. Postcards bought secondhand have become swallows from the recent private and collective past that say hello to the present time.

Medium: analog collage. Materials: cardboard, old postcards, and magazines.

Development: creation of a standard-sized quilt based on digital copies of the collages, printed in a limited edition. I also plan to work with the texts from the postcards in a zine format.