Elida Tessler e 365: equilíbrio frágil de uma espera ou promessa de envios

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.