Who can receive a postcard and who cannot, and why? This question drove the group led by TC participants Natania Prezant, Natalia SierraYen, Wing Yan Lin, Ting-Yu, Kenneth Lin and Zhaoyue Fan to their interactive performance shown at the Athens commune. In the created post office, the audience could pick up and deliver a lost or undelivered postcard.
We started this project with a general interest in postcards. Postcards are two-sided, one side with image and one side with text, which both are open and intimate, superficial and genuine. Postcards as tourist souvenirs represent the most iconic sceneries of an area (a mask); postcards indicate mobility, class (travel) and stability (fixed address) at the same time; a postcard is sending and receiving; is a locus of passage, a vessel (carrying) and a membrane (border). Postcards can cross nations. Occasionally, postcards get lost on their journeys.
With all these thoughts, we set out to explore the neighbourhood around Omonia, Athens; a place where different cultures and economies assemble, decav and development coexist. and our presentation venue Communitism is located. Empty houses and homeless people on the street pushed us to ask: What is a home? Who has a home? Why do some people leave their homes? What could home be?
This led us to our core question: Who can or cannot receive a postcard, and why? Our engagement with the above issues resulted in a durational, interactive performance presented in the office of the “Institution for Lost Postcards.” The sewing room with the peacock blue wall at Communitism set the tone of the institution. In the office, audience members receive the opportunity to pick up and complete the delivery of a lost or undelivered postcard.
Based on our real-life post office experiences, we offered the audience a questionnaire that stimulates reflection, a whole bureaucratic procedure that requires patience, a personalized postcard based on their questionnaire, and a free postage stamp. Within this project, we also created a multimedia set of postcards: illustrated postcards, photography postcards, textile postcards as well as sound postcards.
Group members: Natania Prezant, Natalia SierraYen, Wing Yan Lin, Ting-Yu, Kenneth Lin, Zhaoyue Fan
Published: 5.10.2021
Location: Communitism, Athens
Discipline: Fine Arts
Language: English
Programme: Transcultural Collaboration