EXHIBITION
Equidistant From The Sun
August 25, 2024 — September 1, 2024
Strenči Photo Studio Pop-Up, Rīgas 5, Strenči
Produced by Anna Volkova and Vladimirs Svetlovs
Graphic design: Vladimirs Leibgams
Thank you to our collaborators: Orbīta
Supporters: Latvian State Culture Capital Foundation; Valmiera County Culture Department
In the spring of 2024, in response to an invitation from the Strenči Photography Workshop, the Belgian photographer and mail art enthusiast Thomas Vandenberghe began a visual conversation with artists from Latvia. Meeting in Strenči, the participants in the correspondence – mostly photographers – experimented with different photographic techniques and prepared their own personal messages. After leaving Strenči, the correspondence continued, with more and more participants joining.
The exhibition was the result of this three-month exchange of letters and brought together letters containing photography or drawings, created and sent to Strenči by correspondents from Latvia, Estonia, Poland, France, Belgium, Greece, Portugal and the USA.
After the exhibition ended, we forwarded the participants’ letters to one another to ensure their correspondence continued uninterrupted.
Agnija Anča
Anonymous
Daira Briede
Elena Surmonina
Ida Folkmane
Participants’ names in alphabetical order:
Leslie Hickey
Suzanne Vandenberghe
Teodors Strokins
Valentīna
photo by Baiba Zvejniece
If a mail art exhibition is one that cannot be evaluated in conventional terms, then what are we to do with what we see? I propose an approach based on empathetic engagement, which I will illustrate with Elza Neimane’s mail art piece of colorful sweets, accompanied by the text: “30 days without sweets — eat these in my place.” The work invites us to step into someone else’s skin — it shifts the focus toward relationships (I will not eat; I will give them to you, and you will eat them while I abstain). Mail art presumes that what is sent is something personally meaningful or important to the sender, and I have no right to declare it uninteresting; my task is simply to try to empathize and understand how the sender themselves sees what has been sent.
At the exhibition opening, the Strenči postwoman likewise invited visitors to engage in this act of empathetic identification, noting that the post most often carries debt-collection letters, so the sudden influx of colorful and vibrant mail was a surprising and joyful shift in the rhythm of everyday life. And what do you most often receive in your own mailbox? Political advertising? Bills?
(translated from Latvian by ChatGPT)
Daniela Zālīte
Māksla, ko nevērtē, satori.lv
mail art by Elza Neimane
photo by Baiba Zvejniece