Story about (Post Card) Stories

[post_card_stories]

 

I've started this blog today, at the end of February 2019, to show the postcards that I send and receive, via my personal correspondents and the platforms like Postcrossing. I also plan to write stories about my experiences related to these postcards. It's aimed to be partly a sedimentation of the materials, and partly a tool for reflection.

I plan to write here in a (more or less) real time. I also need to show the postcards that I've sent and received in the last half a year or so (and hopefully also write the stories about them, even if retrospectively). I guess, for a while this blog will be bi-directional, time-wise: I will be writing 'forward' when adding the new cards, and writing back-ward, adding the old cards.  Or may be this 'for a while' will last forever :) 

PS: On the 'mirrors':

Eventually (or better say, inevitably) this blog - as well the whole business of my postcard exchanges - started to gravitate toward 'mirrors' (whether these mirrors used in various artworks depicted on the postcards, or 'just mirrors', used in one way or another on (by?) these postcards themselves.

I study this subject for years, and write on it elsewhere. I didn't plan anything specifically related to mirrors when I started my postcard exchanges... yet I wrote about this interest in my profile on Postcrossing, and many of my correspondents knew about it, too.

When I started to received my first 'mirror postcards', I felt both happy and bemused. One of the key features of my 'Art Mirrors Art' project has been, and remains to be its relative 'weightlessness': my large collection of artworks with mirrors is entirely digital and didn't plan to collect anything physical (e.g., mirrors themselves, or the actual artworks).

And yet it happened, at least on a level of postcards with these artworks. Step by step (i.e., card by card) my collection grew, and by now (circa 2021) consists of more than 500 artefacts (this includes the cards I've received via Postcrossing and from other correspondents as well as the cards I bought myself).

The growth became especially quick when I begun practicing 'direct swaps': in other ways, I didn't only passively wait when someone would send me a 'mirror cards' but started to actively request to exchange such cards when I saw them appearing somewhere on the Postcrossing platform. 

Many of these exchanges remained to be limited by one or two cards, but I also have cases when they evolved into a long streaks of correspondences, with dozens of postcards exchanged at the end (or sometimes with such 'ends', as some of these 'swaps' continue).

The tag #mirror will help you to see such 'mirror cards', and the tag #mirror_swap will selectively show only the cards obtained via these direct exchanges. Visually, almost all my 'mirror postcards' are also shown on a green background of the cutting mat, something like that:



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