This is an ongoing series…

I have been studying Ikebana arrangements, and mainly the meaning of it. It has to do with the base of my work, the world of interiority, absences, the impermanence and unforgettable beloved ones, the meaningful remembrances that bring permanence, and will stay until our own end in our memory.

I was in a thrift store, and I saw in a basket on the floor, a couple of letters with a post stamp 1945, it caught my attention and I bought them. It took me almost a year until I decided to open these letters. I felt that I was intruding in someone else life…it was not easy to take them out from the envelope…After that, I kept buying letters, from 1942 to 1945, from the internet.

I realized that these letters were from soldiers, that were at the front, writing to their families…it was very touching and amazing at the same time to have in my hands the past, knowing the future, what was going to happen…in one letter a sailor told his mom that he “was ready to go “, this letter was written just before the Battle of Cape Gloucester, between December 26 , 1943 and January 16 1944. Another soldier writes that he has his parachute ready and inspected 100 times. Many soldiers were farmers and were worried about having their dads doing the work all along and losing their crops, there are some comments too about missing mom’s food and specially missing the family…

Also, some soldiers wrote about sleeping on wet grounds, or under the rain for weeks… many comments were crossed out, they had to be careful on the content, to don’t give any precise information, just in case the mail was caught by the enemy.

An army soldier wrote to his dad that he wasn’t going to write soon because he was going to be busy “learning French”…that was days before the landing on Normandie…

There are also letters from moms, dads sisters, girlfriends …all carrying the worries of losing their loved one. The uncertainties of their survival, the anguish of their parents, the panic and desperation of moms to receive “that knock on the door'', as one mom refers to, letting them know that their son died in action or is missing…Everything is so palpable and felt profoundly….

Even notes from girlfriends worried that they don’t love them any more….” Do you still Like Peggy?, or why they don’t respond their letters any longer.

My works are rooted in absences, the consequences of violence, war, people who have disappeared, abuse of power…trying from this absence to bring a presence, no physically of course, but as a remembrance about the collateral effect of war, for example, besides the human loss.

Here is my encounter with some of these letters… and there was more than a tear.

“Words are never enough when, what one wants to say overflow the soul”

— Julio Cortazar