Friends in correspondence

[above] An extract from ‘I Send you this Cadmium Red’ by John Berger and John Christie.

I have started a series of correspondences with my ‘friends’ on the project.

With the exception of the one friend in Porto, I visited each friend in turn to give them a copy of my contract and to exchange signatures. With each contract were a set of cards, pre-stamped, for each friend to return to my home address. These cards are for each friend to describe their perception of Fontainhas and to outline what they would like to see it as in the future. There is naturally some room here for their responses to also form a critique or a response to what I provided to them in my contract document.

Friends were all told that this process is the beginning of a correspondence series. Nobody is obliged to continue the process, so as to make it a more natural thing, which places the onus on me to ’seduce’ each of them into continuing.

This ’seductive relatonship’ is modelled in part on John Berger and John Christie’s published correspondence on colour, ‘I send you this cadmium red’, wherein each letter was both a ‘gift’ in the form of a colour, and an episode in a conversation.