Based on the „Mail Art“ of the futurists, the project „Silent Mail“ was about working with a group of people on a round-based artwork. Person one starts and passes the resulting work to person two, who adds or edits what they find and passes it on to person three. When person three has finished their work, the cycle starts again. In total there were two passes.

When I received the work as the third person, it was a pair of painted eyes that looked enchanted. Above the red painted eyes there was a kind of feather decoration in a matching red tone.

This design obviously went in the direction of classical aesthetics. something that can generally be called „beautiful“. It would have been obvious to draw a face and to strive for a round design. This displeases me deeply. I didn't see any artistic value in the production of a „beautiful“ picture and wanted to take the work out of its profane meaninglessness.

In order to achieve this, I decided to confront the found something ugly as a contrast. The ugly should re-contextualize the beautiful and vice versa. I also hoped that by taking this step I would be able to lure my group a little bit out of their reserve without making a fool of their design.

Obviously I succeeded, because I got a picture from which I could see that at least one of my comrades-in-arms was overstrained.

To round things up I replaced the background with a moon landscape as a refference to the wild conspiracy theories that are currently rampant and to go into the banners and speech bubbles „humanity“ and „altruism“. It was important to me to increase the absurdity and the interpretative dimensions even more.