Letters from a Wounded Land 2025
An (Un-)Archival Mail Art Project
 

Created during Erasmus+ Blended Intensiv Program Re-enchanting the Field




  •  Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me.

    — the Ghost, Hamlet

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The letters I sent back from Narva lie on my bedside table, still smelling of burnt limestone. On the back, my name and address in my own handwriting, an Estonian stamp, and a sticker marked PRIORITAIRE PAR AVION remind me of the question at the heart of this project: What does it take to archive a wounded land marked by absences, gaps, and holes, both historical and material, whose presence lingers like ghosts?

Through Mail Art, I turned field notes and thoughts into a series of letters. Memory and stone: the landscape is built from them1 , just as the letters I left in the foreign post office in Narva sending back to my apartment in Vienna. What arrived ten days later was itself a ghost of my experiment, an archive that traveled by another plane and landed in my postbox.  

Archiving is a kind of interment, laying something in a coffin2 . But what I am doing here is not putting these ghosts to rest. Perhaps they had already settled into their own deathbeds — ghost towns and ash mountains, unrecognized yet undisturbed. Instead, I compelled them to sit in an envelope, travel 1,412 kilometers, and speak to me in their shattered language. This was not archiving but un-archiving: assembling a repertoire of traces collected through days of wandering and searching for the hidden, the unheard, the haunted. So each letter holds its own visual language, tied to a person or place, and becomes a fragment of the whole un-archive.
What enters the archive is always a choice shaped by power. It turns collective memory into a commodity, rewriting catastrophic histories for the sake of a brighter future. In Ida-Virumaa, this means rebranding oil shale wastelands as “Adventure Land” while covering over violent histories with the rhetoric of tourism.

In response to this polished image, I asked what my un-archive could hold, knowing my perspective as an outsider would remain partial and subjective. So I began with my own story of arrival and let each postcard become a letter to myself — fragments of memory, absence, and ghosts that make up an archive not only of the place but also of the self who sends and receives them.

1 Printsmann, A. (2012). The land of oil shale: A cultural landscape of post-industrial Estonia.
In Cultural landscapes of Europe: Fields of Demeter (Citing Schama)

2 Mbembe, A. (2002). The power of the archive. In Refiguring the Archive.