Dear Orphan Letters
"The vampire liked to wander in postwar cities such as Beirut, lingering at shattered shop signs, whose remaining letters formed
incomprehensible words that resonated with his cryptic language."
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video
1:35 minutes
2015
Jalal Toufic
An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film
After finding the mysterious ‘D’ at The Crypt Gallery, I started collecting Orphan Letters. Found left in the city they act as a ruin that evidences the passing of time. Lingering at shattered shop signs or in street signals, their intrinsic overlooked quality makes them a trigger for creating new narratives.
Dear Orphan Letters
Installation view
The city has been the canvas for developing the site-responsive character of my practice. A combination of research and serendipity, my prolonged investigations of sites, are a way of noticing patterns, rhythms or anomalies. By using the apparent simplicity of the everyday, I transform the overlooked into catalyst for creating new narratives.
Dear Orphan Letters and Decrypt D Crypt, transcend the book format inserting words in the city’s surfaces. Language interrupts the temporality of the city. Generating new semantic associations, text expands its significance located within the urban context. In this process the recipient is awaken to decipher meaning and to construct his/her own connections permeated by memories and personal experiences. This alters everyday life and re-configure people’s relation with public space.
The strength of this works reside in their capacity to subtlety intervene the surfaces, by using few element to draw attention to the already ghostly presence of found traces. The impermanence and transience intrinsic to any site-specific work, is reinforced by the ephemeral quality of the materials I use. A slide projector and a set of cards, become symbolic indexes of what they’re representing.
