First came the meeting. Postcards_email@rt is a curatorial offering which engages five artists from five different countries. We – the curators – initiated meetings as needed by this project, yet none of us is really at home. We meet in an untamed, unknown reality, talking and inviting artists to take part.

In working on this project, we tried to find out what this reality is for us, and what the process itself might be. How do the curators and artists fit into it? Initiating a shared exchange, we speculated about what this meeting might involve. But did we actually meet? As time went on by, as curators we stopped having control over what the story itself was. The concept began to lose form, contracting, expanding, shifting shape. It seems impossible here to show constant increases – more perseverance,  studying the process itself. The postcards which were sent in function separately, but they also create a fragmentary collage of events, in which someone might see in them a single sequence, a single image.

We are now thinking about this project as a mutual presence, respecting existing differences and openness to influences, the possibility of exchange. We are trying to find ourselves in relations – bit by bit, each one of us is after all a guest here, postcards reaching us from places where we are not. Perhaps due to how un-obvious this situation is, as established by this project – being on the borderline between one's own space and that belonging to others – now we are more ready for openness and being attentive to discovering that which comes from there. All the time remaining ourselves. We are dealing with doubt here – undermining established convictions. It's about asking questions, being ready to verify and dismiss existing laws. It's also about not pretending that things are different only because one is somewhere else. Our perspective is not the only one out there – but it is ours – we are not transparent.

Let us look a little more broadly, for the world we have known has become a web woven of information, filled with truths, half-truths and falsehoods, where it becomes ever harder to tell them all apart. Nonsense appears side by side with factual data, the whole filtered for us by algorithms which constantly create new informational bubbles. We live in parallel worlds, exposed to content which helps confirm previously expressed opinions. This wealth of information competes with a deficit of attention spans. Today, everyone can have their own truths. And we cannot tell what those truths might be.

Alternatives exist, and both sides have influence over the course of events. When this exchange is initiated by one of the sides, then the other decides if it wishes to respond. And how. One can walk away or go deeper inside. Postcards is a project involving learning new things, involving the experience of the other. We thought we would learn something about others, yet we learned something about ourselves. We designed an open situation in the hope you too would be open. And doubtful. Doubt is our outcome.

Olga Drygas, Sasapin Siriwanij

Here you can watch all the Postc@rds