10 Jul Anyuta Wiazemsky
Residency period: November 2018
Welcome to the first postcard shop in Blanca.
Postcards are memories of the places where we have been, where we are or where we live.
Towns like Venice or Bruges are contaminated with the drive of tourism: life is organised around the random visitors from all the world. These towns die every night and arise every day with the final and first working hours of the souvenir shops. During the day you can barely see the town through all the crowds. Only those who provide tourists with services survive; the cafes and restaurants, boat tours, horse tours, souvenir shops, ‘traditional’ shops, hotels and bed-and-breakfasts. Postcards are symbols of this tourist led deterioration of social landscape… or are they?
Postcards are material pieces of evidence of us having been somewhere, which we want to share with the people we know, these pieces themselves acquiring experience and traces of travelling. Or are they?
This is a radical shop where you don’t need money to buy. You only need to promise you will send the purchased postcards with a short message of your own to the address of Anyuta Wiazemsky Snauwaert, and after you’ve done that, you will receive a new card from Belgium produced as a physical visualisation of one’s memory of a place you might have never been to.
