Elida Tessler e 365: fragile balance of a waiting or a shipping promise

Abstract

In this article, we aim to dialogue with Elida Tessler’s artistic work, specifically her work 365, to reflect about subjects as sending and time. This installation – located between literature and visual art, word and image – emerges from an invitation by the artist to her interlocutors (known and unknown) to choose a letter from the favorite authors and send her a copy by mail. She waited for these correspondences for a year – 365 days –, between 2014 and 2015, to set up her exhibition with all the cards arranged in a huge suitcase. We understand her gesture, moved by affections, as a search for the fragile balance of a wait, of those letters sent as a promise, contingency. In her creative process, she proposes, to herself and to the other, new temporalities, escaping chronology and approaching a fluid time, with its multiple durations. In order to deepen this analysis, we evoke the theory of thinkers like Henri Bergson, Jacques Derrida, George Steiner, Giorgio Agamben, and others.