An Interlude

Dear friends,

When I lived in Barcelona in the early 1990s, I used to write letters to my mum. I wrote a lot of them. That was before the internet and many other things we deem normal these days. In those letters, in place of the usual date and location, I used to write my emotional status. So she would read, for instance: ”On a rainy morning, much too early to confess,” at the beginning of the letter, and then I would proceed to tell her about my adventures and reflections of that period. Usually what followed was somewhat poetic, somewhat political, full of the nostalgia of a college kid—missing home while urging myself to live the experience to its fullest. You know, "youth is wasted on the young,” and all those things ...

I’m not so far away from those feelings these days, again, as we plan to send you a note from our desks every two weeks--offering you thoughts about The Showroom's online archive, about past and present projects, in the hope that this offers you an interlude, hopefully, something you experience as beautiful and interesting, that redirects your mind away from some of the new routines we are learning to live with. The point I'm getting to with this long prologue is that what follows is not necessarily your usual newsletter, because these are not typical times. And that, for the first time, we want not to invoke the ’voice’ of the organisation, but offer you our personal reflections, writing to you fortnightly about our current projects as well as other things in our archive, as if they were a state of mind, or perhaps a note to self--if one is to follow Simnikiwe Bulunghu’s invitation ... Because, like my mum, while you might know the date I’ve written this and from where, you might not know how I feel.

Warmly,
E

Elvira Dyangani Ose
Director, The Showroom