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Sound mix: Pejk Malinovski Voices: |
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Through a collection of postcards depicting the town square in Roskilde, Denmark, the installation Dearest. I'll be there on Sunday gives voice to a widespread but overlooked form of communication.
The postcard is a meeting place of the private and the public; on the front side there is an (often) idealized depiction of a public place, while the back is used for a personal message. In Dearest. I'll be there on Sunday, 63 postcards tell a story of the Roskilde town square during the past 100 years, moving stylistically from copperplates through black and white photographs and hand-colored prints to the color photographs of the present. The function as well as the representation of the square has changed over time, just as the personal messages reflect changes in language use and social conventions. Some of the messages on the earliest postcards have a function similar to contemporary text messages: ”Dear Sister. I have paid for your dress, so you no longer have debt.” Others witness serious stories, such as the message from a wounded soldier writing from the garrison hospital in 1915: ”Dear Nielsen. I am lying here waiting for my legs. I have tried them on. It went OK. Yours Sincerely, 309.”
The 63 postcards were collected from online auction sites and second hand book stores. They are installed horizontally and organized by their vantage point on the square, emulating a camera pan over the square. In combination with ambient sound recordings the detached text fragments from the postcards are interwoven into a polyphonic sound montage that fills the installation. The sound montage is developed in collaboration with poet and radio documentarist Pejk Malinovski.
Installation view, "Dearest. I'll be there on Sunday", Museum for Contemporary Art, Roskilde, 2009