2001
Color lithographs
size 50 x 65 cm each

   Numerous and various are the means by which people are getting in touch with each other. Each of them, depending on the used way of communication, has its formal characteristic features and perfunctory signs. Since years I am keeping up an intensive correspondence with many friends, colleagues and wide circle of acquaintance from different countries. I have kept the letters and envelopes and they seem to me beautiful by theme selves - with the stamps, postmarks, seals, hand-written addresses, additional notes. Each letter keeps its secrets until open. Firstly it brings hot news, and after being read it turns into a keepsake - this way it possesses a history of its own.

   I really do regret that the rapid and convenient electronic means of communication deprive us of the pleasure to expect opening of parcels. And although there comes almost nothing by post nowadays, letters' stories still exist. Each envelope possesses of its own identification through the stamps (state belonging), handwritings (personal identity), seals (institutional certificate). Certainly each of us can be identified by its personal contacts. Envelopes act as an evidence for the distance covered on a certain occasion. Gathered in a pile, all these symbolic testimonies of old communication ways seem to speak to us in Babylonian, a mixture of different languages, in which we get into contact, announce, inform each other.

   It concerns also the discretion of private correspondence - to read other people's letters is unacceptable. I have desired to shift these images into art works - as the big enlargement transforms them from an usual parcel into proof of friendships, personal contacts, messages, explanations, shared information, told stories, or simply texts. Of the existence of somebody somewhere.

Elena Panayotova
February 2001