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Avigail Moss | No Sender or Receiver – Only an Address
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Let us imagine, just for the sake of imagination, that there were no post offices in the world. Oh! What a disaster it would have been [sic]! All of us would be permanently detached from each other. (…) The world would seem abundantly larger. All my thoughts and dreams would remain mine only, they could never be communicated to you… [1]
Each angel is a bearer of one or more relationships; today they exist in myriad forms, and every day we invent billions of new ones. However we lack a philosophy of such relationships.[2]
Set in the landscaped surroundings of one of Bern’s former battlements, Kleine Schanze (Little Redoubt Park) features a monument displaying five suspended figures that encircle a bronze globe balanced on a granite shelf. As representatives of five continents, the figures extend their arms to one another like the winged Hermes, capes and headdresses flying behind them in the wind. They pass a sequence of letters around the metallic sphere, while a sixth seated figure representing the city of Bern looks on. Although this monument to the international postal system was unveiled in 1909, it could also function as a reference to today’s free-falling satellite technology. The figures exchange envelopes in a dramatic display of epistolary cohesion, conveying from within the municipality a single message of global camaraderie. The monument, titled in German Weltpostdenkmal, was adopted as the official logo of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) in 1967. Its forms project beyond symbolic visions. They point in an emphatically material way to the body, the hand, to writing materials, and to an organization charged with regulating some of the remaining vestiges of material interconnectedness.
Overseeing its 191 member nations as a single postal territory, the UPU standardizes shipping costs and monitors the reliability of domestic postal systems. Every year the organization releases over 4,000 test letters and parcels into the postal systems, discreetly tracking them in a closed loop from sender to receiver, attempting to ensure that the links remain connected.
In contradiction to the apparent material connotations, the angelic postal workers hover in their own heavenly dimension. They represent the idealized form, content and flow of communication. Comparing Renaissance depictions of angels to modern day telecommunication systems, Michel Serres reminds us that the angel was a messenger, "able to pass through space, time and walls". Serres describes how the angels of monotheist traditions (Jewish, Christian and Muslim) were said to move through space at the speed of their own thoughts and that the transformation of the word into flesh was the ultimate message. Who are these five angels of global communication and commerce? And what secret thoughts do their own letters contain? Are they discrete messages from each continent? Or do we see a single delivery as it is passed from hand to hand? Could this transmission exist in several places at once, never to arrive at its final destination, and certainly never to be opened? What is the language of this never-to-be-revealed message? Questions multiply faster than they may be transmitted.
[1] Sharmini Abbasi, Bangladesh. First Prize Winner of the Universal Postal Union’s 13 th International Letter Writing Competition for Young People. Theme: What if the Post Did Not Exist? 1984.
[2] Michel Serres, Angels, A Modern Myth, Flammarion, 1993.
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