Morfill, S., Leimanis, I., Dorrian, E., Mancke, C., Sarkar, J., 2024.

Five Years Correspondence Project: Receive Draw Gift

Play is not something that happens in the mind.... It is not a subjecting act or attitude, but is, rather, an activity that always goes on in-between the players and reaches beyond the behaviour or consciousness of any individual player. Play has a life, essence, or spirit of its own that emerges from the players' engagement in their to-and-fro rhythm. [1]

The first iteration of the Five Years Correspondence Project (May 2023 - March 2024) quietly hummed along in the background of our lives for the best part of a year. With a nod to the Surrealists' Exquisite Corpse method, it constituted a series of playful exchanges through a remote form of drawing with others. Every so often that quiet hum hit a crescendo - a moment of joy and surprise - on the arrival of a 'gift' through the post.

Each ad-hoc package circulated through the group contained a drawing initiated by one of the eight participants. These sparked a series of cumulative visual correspondences, acted upon by each recipient in a random order determined by the original sender. Unlike the back and forth of a written correspondence between two, the drawings could only move forward through the list of names. Without prior knowledge of the drawings' meanings - and with no rules beyond the size of the envelope* - each improvised addition, abstraction, disruption, or deconstruction was an individual response to a gift received, then gifted anew. The results, exhibited at Five Years in March 2024, is a collective work that, in theory, is free of the limitations we face as individuals, from varying positionalities and intersections of experiencing the world.

For the Drawing Articulations symposium, we proposed a second iteration of the Correspondence Project. The exchanges took place over a single day, and the group of correspondents expanded to include all symposium participants interested in exploring notions of play, gifting and collectivity in relation to drawing. We proposed a two-part activity:
· An invitation to participants to engage in the interactive play of giving and receiving, bringing their own vocabulary of mark-making to a series of drawings that will infiltrate all areas of the symposium.
· A sharing of all the extensions / growths / reductions to the gifts and discussion of how drawing articulates the experience of drawing participants.

A significant part of the original postal project was the joy of receiving a 'gift' in the post, the surprise on opening the mail, as well as seeing what everyone did, the journeys our 'drawings' took to the end. In this way, our proposed intervention in the symposium was a way for us to fumble towards a more defined articulation of the 'gift', alongside our understanding of the sharing and community created.

*Size parameters were defined by the royal mail large letter format: maximum dimensions 25cm width, 35.3cm length, 2.5cm depth. £2.70 Postage (up to 100g) with a max weight of 750g.

[1] Vilhauer, M. (2010) Gadamer's Ethics of Play: Hermeneutics and the Other. Plymouth: Lexington Books.