The Netherlands, 1994
timneutel.com
With far-traveling tongue
Silkscreen on local newspaper
Dear Tim
I hope this postcard finds you well, feeling healthy and healed — and that your passionate enterprises have been successful. Please do remember to shower after the swim and don’t forget to use the suntan lotion. It certainly is dangerous out there.
Your friend
As a postcard, this is a homage to a series of postcards written by Georges Perec with the title “Two Hundred and Forty-three Postcards in Real Colour.” It was first published in something called “Le Fou parle”, October 1978. It was dedicated to Italo Calvino.
First of them goes like this: “We’re camping near Ajaccio. Lovely weather. We eat well. I have got sunburnt. Fondest love.” And the 4th last one like this: “We’re at the Vienna and Zimmerli. Lots of lazing about beside the lake, regattas and casino. Much love.”
For Perec, nothing was ever innocent, and everything possessed a potentiality. A potentiality for desired details and naughty nuances. What he was after was the moment of the infra-ordinary, the movement towards the science of the singular.
It was something to share and to care for, that empathic gesture, not like breathing in and out, but like breathing in-between. The hesitating beauty of its thisness, its urgent elegancy and the courage to stay, to remain in between what-is-not-yet-there and what-is-already-gone.
Mika Hannula
