Meagrels

By Daria Ivans

This piece is part of Love-letters, a collection of digital works collated by guest curator Jess Hewett. Love-letters considers the possibility of love-letters as a mode of online writing that can escape problems of solipsism in girlblogging. This release offers love-letters as a collaborative assemblage of desire beyond any one given subject, dwelling on Deleuze’s provocation that “all writing is a love-letter”.

જ⁀➴ ✉︎

Daria Ivans - xenomedia artist based in St.Petersburg, Russia. Personal website - https://dariaivans.neocities.org/ inst - https://www.instagram.com/_lshfn/

જ⁀➴ ✉︎

This year I became the wife of a political prisoner. My partner, a poet and a sociologist, has been in a Russian prison for half a year. For these months, letters have been the only way we can speak to one another. Some pass through censorship. Some we manage to send secretly. Some never arrive at all and vanish somewhere along the way, in an unknown stretch of absence.

He wrote this story for me to ease the anxiety and sorrow that had begun to fill our recent letters. It is a story about travel, time, memory, and the longing for a place to be together. It resists translation into any language but Russian, and still I took it upon myself to try.

At first it reached me in three pages. The censors managed to lose the last one. After some time, it was found and sent to me as well.