Daniel Jablonski – FWD: Sorry for the Delay extd.

Do you still use email? How many unread messages do you have in there?

If you owe someone a reply, or someone owes you one, forward the conversation to the artist. They will resume it for you, regardless of the delay:

danieljablonski@vousvoici.com

All the answers will be displayed (anonymously) at Kunstraum Lüneburg from June 30th to July 5th.

FWD: Sorry for the Delay (2016) is an original project conceived by Daniel Jablonski for an exhibition at Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo which focused on art in the age of telecommunications.

Through an open call, the artist invited the audience to forward their own delayed or unanswered emails: love letters, business deals, junk mail, missed connections, or pending proposals—anything that had not been responded to (or even sent) for various reasons. Over the course of a month, the artist acted as a mediator between the senders and addressees, granting a temporary amnesty for communication that had been interrupted for days, months, or even years. At the end of the project, the messages were briefly exhibited as an installation piece.

Revolving around an idea put forward by Argentinian writer Ricardo Piglia, the project raises questions about communication as a financial transaction — and most specifically debt — while also enabling an interaction that otherwise would not happen again. Re-activated ten years later for the Afterlife of Networks, the piece now raises other questions, such as the relevance of e-mail in an era of instant messaging. Has it become an obsolete medium, or did its place just shift in a wider panorama of worldwide communication?

This intallation is shown as part of the workshop ‘The Afterlife of Networks’ that is conceived and organized by Nathalia Lavigne.