We shouldn’t get too misty-eyed about this persistence of a lost art behind bars; after all, it’s a sign of deprivation. If prisoners had access to cell phones and the internet, they would be tweeting, too – and perhaps their voices would be more difficult to silence.
And yet, everyday practices such as letter-writing or texting cannot help but shape our Being-in-the-world. A letter is a material thing: you can hold it in your hands, and you can lose it. The temporality of letter-writing is much slower than texting; you can’t expect an immediate response, and so there’s more time to reflect on the impact your words might have on the receiver. If you know that the mail is delivered at a certain time every day, then there’s no point in obsessively checking your inbox. This might not help to decrease your anxiety, especially if you feel like your life depends upon the response; but it also doesn’t feed an addictive relation to delivery mechanism.
Somewhere in between the letter and the text message is the humble postcard.
What does it mean to send a postcard from prison, or to prison for that matter? In Fall 2012, REACH Coalition collaborated with WUI Artist Collective to create a series of postcards from death row. REACH is a prison education and advocacy group based in Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, TN; members include prisoners on death row and volunteers from the outside (including me). WUI, or Wildland Urban Interface, is an artist collective whose members include Jonathan Rattner of Vanderbilt University’s Film Studies Program and John Engelbrecht of Public Space One.
We all came together one afternoon at the prison for a workshop on artist postcards. Participants were guided through a process to create an ideal image for their “postcard from death row.” The brainstorming notes proved to be powerful on their own, and the collective decided to use the stark and simple text as imagery for the postcards, rather than attempting to fill the gap between word and image, inside and outside. We displayed these postcards and distributed them to the public in an art exhibition at Vanderbilt’s Sarratt Gallery in early 2013, called Imagining Justice from the Inside Out.
The postcard project found new life when Bryant Smith, a
student at Watkins College of Art, responded with drawings and doodles of his
own. You can see some of Bryant’s
responses here
(scroll down). We then brought Bryant,
Jonathan, and a couple of other people back to the prison to give the cards to
inside members of REACH, and to continue the conversation in person. This spontaneous elaboration of the project
felt like a necessary part of its completion.
This got us thinking: What other conversations might be possible, starting from these simple postcards? So we reprinted 5 of the designs (chosen fairly randomly to represent a range of different approaches) and the insiders addressed these cards to themselves.
For the past month, I have been distributing these cards by hand to people in Chicago, Geneva, Paris, and Berlin. Next month, I will bring them to England, Australia and New Zealand. You can follow the project on the REACH Coalition website here.
I have received some interesting responses to the project so far. Someone in Geneva said, “You are giving us a gift, but also a burden.” A “soldier” at Checkpoint Charlie said, “I have an open mind.”
The fact that these cards are self-addressed by a stranger changes the nature of the postcard. Someone has put their mark on the card, and even if that mark were illegible, the card would have be singular; it now bears the traces of a hand. But the mark is not illegible; it is the address of the man who wrote it. And the man who wrote it is not just a random stranger, but a man who is both convicted of murder and condemned to death. What would you write to this person, knowing that you will probably never met them, and yet also knowing that you hold a bit of their hand-writing in your hand? Or would you draw something, as Bryant Smith did? Or would you put the card on your fridge and think about it for a while?
We invite you to participate in this project by sending your request for postcards from death row by email to [email protected], or by mail to:
Dr. Lisa Guenther
Vanderbilt University
Department of Philosophy
229 Furman Hall
Nashville, TN 37240 USA
We also invite you to find a creative way to document your postcard, and send this documentation to one of the above addresses. Some ideas include: scanning your card, taking a digital photo of it in a particular location, taking a picture of yourself holding the card, and so forth.
For me, this is a project of phenomenology as a practice of liberation. I’m interested in what it feels like to send a postcard to death row, or to hold one of these cards in your hand, or even to be asked to participate in a project like this. What, if any, thoughts and feelings does this project raise for you? How did you decide what to write or draw? Does the gift outweigh the burden? What other burdens do we bear in a world where state execution is still practiced? Post your thoughts below, or send me a message at [email protected].
Recent Comments