| Abstract: | This series of letters, written collaboratively by Susan Brind & Jim Harold, are extracted from an on-going larger project that goes under the working title Coffee Letters. The letters reference observations, events and encounters that have been witnessed together or individually by the artists since the turn of the 20th-21st Century. They span a period of over 20 years and the larger body of writings from which these are extracted all relate to peripheral and border locations within the UK, mainland Europe, Scandinavia and the Mediterranean region. Extracts from the body of work have been shown in the form of installations and exhibitions in Glasgow and Münich, and have been integrated as a performative element within academic conference papers in Glasgow, London and Nicosia.
Written jointly, the letters assume the voice of an anonymous ‘I’ and are written to an unnamed ‘you’, whose location is unspecified. The letters forge a relationship – by means of reflecting upon historical and current events, and moments suggested as shared – that reaches across continents, cultures and time. Incorporating empirical knowledge, direct observation, and reflexive writing, they are located in the world of a coffee drinker as liminal observer: absorbed in a transitory world of passage, relative nostalgia, and melancholy. The state provided by this space is one of presence and of reflection on cultural, social and political conditions, and is informed by political commentary, travel writings from Europe and the Middle East, the literature and aesthetics of vernacular cosmopolitanism and the tension of borders. It acknowledges, too, the detail of everyday life and on one’s sense of place. Events, locations, musings, and conversations recalled, are laid down on the page to ‘you’. A bond between writer(s) and reader is forged for the duration of each text, each memory. Each location or place is momentarily combined or joined as a shared experience of ‘being’ – of existential experience – that temporarily brings into proximity feelings of remoteness and closeness, of knowing and unknowability. They are, however, not complete letters. There is no direct addressee and no form of signing off. They retain a form of anonymity, both of the sender and the recipient. They are, in a very real sense, fragments of a letter, and the idea of the fragment is key to their form and intention. They are not complete moments, fully framed or brought to any conclusion. In this regard each letter becomes a moment of pause or passage between two senses of place, the one predicated by its nature as a fragment and the other by an invoked sense of loss. As such, they suggest a series of hinterland-like spaces that can only be glimpsed or glanced at. They are, too, about the world of experience and phenomena; of thought and feeling. Each text frames a moment that evolves in its own terms whilst relating to other fragments by means of the series, following an invisible line to a next, and another next, and so on, while in the process mixing connections to establish a new relation: that which resides beyond or outside of the text. |
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