Rehearsing a correspondence for another life: relation and confluence through postal writing

Abstract

This article presents postal writing as a theoretical and poetic operator being developed within the scope of ongoing doctoral research, capable of triggering dialogues about certain contemporary artistic productions that proceed with gestures of correspondence, awakening them as landscapes of relationship. Postal writing refers to works that suggest dialogical counter-narrative practices, allowing this act of writing to be thought of as a kind of joint poetics that provokes an I-other-we relationship. From this perspective, writing transcends the textual realm and encompasses visual, sound, and tactile dimensions, articulated with the artistic, literary, and social fields. The text seeks to consider how these writings construct conversational intentions traversed by collective demands and how such gestures can confront a modern-colonial project based on individuation and the separation of social ties. In dialogue with the concepts of Relationship (Glissant), confluence (Santos) and implicability (Silva), a postal writing approach is developed as a radical mode of sharing, capable of reconfiguring collective experiences by exploring other ways of life and/or intervention within it.