postcards

title: où je suis n’est pas qui je suis

year: 2008 – 2009

location: anywhere the mail is delivered

duration: ongoing

currently:

selected text is lifted from the homeless nation web site as a “ready-made” to then be transcribed in quotation/radio-wave marks on the back of the postcard.

the postcards are then sent to members of the political, artistic and media community with all the names and addresses found on the web.

the project deflects communication from one social networking site whose members represent a certain social/economic status toward members of a different social/economic network. writing text by hand onto the postcard slips the impersonal of the computer screen back into the personal of the human; the trace of the hand moving pen over paper invokes a human presence. as such, transferring text from the homeless nation site onto the postcard takes a text that is intended to be disseminated to as large an audience as possible and redirects it to infiltrate, one-by-one, the specific target audience.

the text lifted from the homeless nation website is not chosen with the goal of obtaining support for the homeless…it is merely a way of infiltrating one reality into another reality. permission is not sought from the original “author,” the project performs the position that information disseminated through social networking sites is already in the public domain and open for fair use.

to date, november 10th, 2009: 1,320 postcards have been mailed.

l’état d’urgence 2008

photos by: jack locke

about 3000 postcards were given out over the course of l’état d’urgence. i handed postcards to people on sainte catherine street in front of l’état,while volunteers who manned the hospitality booth gave postcards out to people who came asking for information.

while at l’état i would sit in the common area and write postcards to members of parliament (no stamp is required to send a letter to a member of the canadian parliament)…after awhile i would ask the person sitting across from me if they would like to join me. one woman sat and wrote about eleven cards, each card was addressed to a different member of parliament and each card spoke to the specific area the member was responsible for.

three post boxes were situated on the l‘état d’urgence site for people to drop their postcards in (after they had written on them.)

background

i made this postcard (12,000 of them!) for “l’état d”urgence” 2008 (november 26 – 30). the image is from my intervention at l’état d’urgence 2007. i am hoping the people who attend l’état will be inspired to think of who they are, and perhaps write a loved one, or write the government to let the people who govern know that where one sleeps does not define who one is.

sometimes the places where we find ourselves seem to define us—informing our identity to such a degree that we think of ourselves in terms of our location.

however, certain places have negative implications which frame us as incompetent, unworthy, or weak. this is especially true I think, of those places where we are the most vulnerable, such as in a long-term care facility, in prison, or on the street. we don’t think of ourselves as a person who is presently sick, or a person who is currently incarcerated, or a person who at the present time sleeps on the street– instead who we are becomes conflated with where we are: i am sick, i am guilty, i am homeless.

however, i believe who we are as a human being is not the same as where we are. who we are is something we can decide for ourselves, we can be compassionate, generous and kind whether we are the c.e.o. of the royal bank or a cashier at mcdonalds. likewise we can be hurtful, dishonest and mean whether we are the prime minister of canada or a panhandler. we are all complex, multi-faceted and mysterious beings. this belief is sometimes hard to hold onto, especially when the eyes of the world judge us negatively, reducing us solely in relation to where we are.

it is important to remember who we are.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

title: nous sommes tous de beaux rêveurs

year: 2007

location: montréal, québec

duration: one year

supported by: dare-dare (part of the dream listener project)

so this is a not-so-good photo of a postcard produced by dare-dare centre de diffusion d’art multidisciplinaire de montréal and dream listener. the cards are deposited at various locations around montréal for people to take and hopefully send. I have been using the postcards to write out a dream and mail it to the person who the dream refers to, in this case mr. harper, canada’s prime minister. I suspect he probably did not receive the card, but I liked the reference between the photo and the notion of a sleeping prime minister, because addressing poverty and homelessness do not seem to be part of his agenda.

April 29, 2007

as part of dare-dare’s fund-raising gala my friend jack locke and I did a conceptual performance where we addressed and mailed 306 “nous sommes tous de beaux réveurs” (we are all beautiful dreamers) postcards. one for every member of the canadian parliament. it took us about four and a half hours to write all the names and addresses –which meant we just missed the last metro home. (I only recently became informed that you can send mail to any member of parliament free, no stamp required…kinda cool. and for those of you who follow canadian politics you will have noticed that this little action has had absolutely no effect on our government’s agenda…)