The Devil Is in the Details (Letters to Myself), 2020

Digital printing, coloured polyfoam The work The devil is in the details (letters to myself) consists of eight postcards with letters to myself, a series of photos and a sculpture. I often write about emotions and thoughts to get them out of my inner world. The heaviness of these thoughts overwhelms me, I feel as though my body and mind are separated. My body has become a tool, a machine. My mind is the leader who wants too much at once and overloads my body. Self-care is not easy. There are setbacks and pauses in the process, and sometimes it feels like everything is getting worse. In the long run, however, I have improved and grown. The decision to make the letters unreadable, but to leave the titles, was due to the fact that even I find it difficult to read the letters, but I wanted to leave some hints about the contents of the letters. I formalised the letters as postcards because they are like vague memories of letters whose existence I remember, but their content is becoming obsolete. Now, in an illegible form, postcards with letters symbolise my memories of worse times that I sometimes remember when I remind myself that I am better now and have moved on. The photo series consists of eight photographs of hand-set foundry types stacked in an abstract way. I wanted to visualise the perceived difficulty of the content of the letters. The original plan was to use typesetting for the dissertation, but due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus that proved impossible, so I decided to take pictures of the print types. When photographed on a light table with a micro lens, the types of prints became distant forms of brutalist architecture that stand in the middle of a large white emptiness. The process acts like self-censorship for the creator: in order to set the text, proofreading must be carefully monitored. In order to achieve a good result, it is necessary to concentrate because any other thought might interfere with the setting of text; otherwise, a typographical error will slip in. The heyday of brutalism fell in a time when humans were like nuts in a great system and under constant censorship. The little humans melted into the grey mass, behaved as they should, and censored their own thoughts. Today, the concept of self-censorship is more of a fear or unwillingness to offend someone’s feelings. The sculpture of the M print type embodies both heaviness and physicality. When the sculpture was completed, I felt how it connected the work as a whole, like a big initial at the beginning of a letter. In order to make the print type the length of my own body (176 cm), I had to increase the size of the regular type by a factor of 70.