For The Large Meadow Post Office

A Selection from the Selamet Archive

“Windows”, 2018

Merve Ünsal

 

 

In September 2015, the Star Newspaper published an announcement that the Selamet Newspaper’s Archive had come to light.

However, the Selamet Newspaper Archive is not shared in whole.

It is not evident whether the Selamet Newspaper mentioned in the announcement is the same one as the Selamet Newspaper published in the 1910’s and whether it’s real or not. There is no information or text on when, how and by whom the newspaper was founded.

The current existence of the Selamet Newspaper comprises only of this announcement and sets of photographs that periodically surface. Another given information is the inscription that was part of the Selamet Newspaper’s credits page: “I wish not to confront you on this matter for the sake of your own salvation.”

The photographs that are thematically grouped together are always detached from their credits and original frameworks, thus objectified, and shown ‘only’ as images.

The photographs in the Selamet Archive, aspiring to gain visibility not in newspaper format but by infiltrating the photography’s channels of circulation, as the footnotes to a text that is always being written and can never be finished or in their unidentifiable state with no credits, are like surfaces of imagery expanding to all directions on temporal planes.

Relating to the ideas of ‘making space’, ‘testing the world’s boundaries, pointing to its corners’ and ‘making connections’ that form the basis of the Large Meadow Post Office, ‘windows’ became the designated theme for the selection made from the Selamet Archive. The postcards, besides their orthodox role as a means of communication transported from one place to another, can also come forth with their visual qualities and be ‘read’ as windows that open perhaps to unknown places. Especially in the ‘Post Office’ context, since those people sending the postcards have access to no information other than the delivery address, pointing to the windowness of this window, and causing a possible draught between two open windows can be regarded among the reasons for selecting the images on the postcards.

Considering that the images on the postcards sometimes represent a place, visualizing the world through these photographs built on the idea of ‘improving’ a place or a time, is indicative of the healing quality of sending postcards to anonymous recipients.

Bearing in mind the postcards to be sent to all four corners of the world and the positioning of the first captured photograph on the windowsill, a debate is held between the interior and the exterior.

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