Stille Post (2020)
Artists: Louis Abel Dunbar (FR), Theodoros Fragkos (GR), Johannes Rantapuska (FI), Angelina Stavela (GR)
Curated by Anna Giannessi and the artists
de.wikipedia: Stille Post is a children's game. In the game, the participants arrange themselves in a row or a circle. One player thinks up a message. This message is then whispered from mouth to ear by one participant to the respective neighbour.
The backbone of the exhibition, i.e. the approach to the production of the artworks, is based on the children's game known as the telephone game or broken telephone (American English), Stille Post in German. For this exhibition four players, artists passed a message to each other as in the mail art movement, a message in any medium they found congenial. A group of people with common status as artists, yet different origins and living in different countries, reinterpreted each other’s work. By using different techniques and without knowing the original message, they performed something akin to a translation relay or indirect translation, where physical interaction gets substituted with international, polymorphous interpretation of each other messages. The production of the pieces and of the exhibition seeks to engage the unreliability of human recollection and the possibilities of intercultural communications.
Our rules
- Every artist sent one mail to every other whisperer. Only postal mail was accepted.
- The content of the mail was decided by the sender. The content could be anything: A photo, collage, drawing, poem, riddle, music, video, scent, ready-made object, etc.
- The works have been documented before the sending.
- The receiver was meant to collaborate with the arrived work. They altered or added anything they pleased.
- Every artist kept Anna updated via email about the process: notification of arrived and sent work.
- Artists didn’t communicate with each other about each other’s work.
- The work was ready after all the persons have worked on it.
- The result is four different works, originated and altered by four persons.