Gentle stranger, I hope this email finds you well is a collection of letters, written by artists around the world. Each artist explores care in some aspect of their work, and each letter is written in response to the previous one. These letters, which may take the form of (creative) writing, sound or visual essays, will be published weekly, from June 1st onwards. With these letters, we invite you to think with us about new ways of thinking about and through care, in these changing times.

This letter by Thukral and Tagra, responds to Merve Ünsal’s, which you can read here.

July 12th, 2020, Gurgaon - INDIA

Dear stranger,
I hope this letter finds you well.
I have been meaning to write and ask about how you are dealing with this change.

I wanted to share that I recently met someone. Getting to know more about the other has been healing, a process that I have appreciated, and respected too. We spoke about the present time with these extreme crises, and the world promptly changed while we talked and chatted. We felt that these historical moments would never be forgiven or forgotten, and socialising will change forever.

We spoke about life and how we have some similarities in our ways of valuing passion, taste, and daily rituals. Mainly, I was stuck with the fragility and vulnerability that we both felt, as we face this moment of economic nausea and emotional paralysis. I realized that while I was going through the moment of despair, and the feeling of a collapsing belief system, he was more agile and nimble. He held me with my loss of hope through his optimism. I am glad we met.

One day, we also called our very young friend. Somehow we felt that we had/needed to connect to the faith, and our childhood has tons of it. To open our arms wide, hug the trees, and sing stories with the birds that come to our windows. It was silly but full of optimism, strange but familiar, purposeless but with a lot of passion. This rare gathering of three was illustrious and also opened a can of forgotten memories, some wrecked, thrown away, uncared for, as stacks of files with markings of unfinished sheets of drawings. This kind of gathering is overwhelming, nostalgic, and makes you aware of the minutes a person has lived. With each second of passing,pumping breath was an experience. Realising the amount of life lived, and some left, we sketched the sketchy future. At the same time, chewing oily fryums and making shapes in the sky again and again with tears of joy and some arguments, we found some familiar but uncanny resemblances between our social beliefs and laughed on new ways to manoeuvre the time.The evening was in a historical park under a Gulmohar tree, and the sounds of sparrow snibbling on our tiffins—a rare lake scene in the heart of Delhi, with Islamic architecture in the background. With the wind blowing through its corridors and allies, the passage led to a massive hall. To digest homemade rice, we thought to run between the red sandstone columns. We ran indifferent directions to measure the lengths and breadths of the crafted columns of ​Diwan-i-Aam.

Playing hide and seek, a relay linking the past with future, running between the corridors of this Public Audience Hall, where people could come and seek legal advice about tax, address hereditary complications and voice their grievances. With a thunderclap, the red sandstone columns started morphing into black, the architecture started appearing unfamiliar.

The panic took over as the hard stone floor turned into the wet pulp and running became severe,and the scene acutely puzzling. The strangeness of this was unprecedented, the slipping feet could only be held by clinging on the side of slick wall-like structures. The ceiling disappeared into the sky. The public hall of 100 x 60 feet became longer, those 27 square bays that had weirdly animated into a six columns grid of text and massive open gallery into a day's newspaper.

Dear stranger, As I narrate all this, I am thinking of you. I feel selfish to display my emotions openly. But does my story give you any comfort? As I think of you as a receiver, what will it be like? As you must have grown up while reading this, have lived more, spent more nights dreaming, and learned about the world-changing. In a different time zone, with impunity and injustice, now, we found ourselves tiny, stuck in the gutter spaces of bad news. With no moral sense, these moments of unreliability, and social fissures, are painful and disturbing!

Sitting under the tree with filtered sunlight and playing in the park, that site of care had turned into an avalanche of trauma, and it was never easy to make sense. Our tiffin boxes, bags and all those sparrows were lost forever. I hope this letter finds you where the children can run around you without being scared, and the common sparrows, which got extinct because of mindless urbanisation, can sing again.

While I write this letter to you, do you see this sharp vision of mine? I recount and claim that I am in love, yet again as I washed-up my face with the ink on my hands, found that the shoes are still wet and survived. These hallucinations of the past have stayed with us, meeting you over and over again has been strangely familiar. I hope this letter brings warmth and repairs our memories and helps us re-appear in a preferable future.

Yours truly,
Stranger

Jiten Thukral (b. 1976, Jalandhar, Punjab, India) and Sumir Tagra (b. 1979, New Delhi, India) work collaboratively with a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, installations, interactive games, video, performance and design. Thukral & Tagra work on new formats of public engagement and attempt to expand the scope of what art can do. They break out of the mediated and disciplinary world and create multi-modal sensory and immersive environments. Their work can be found here and their Instagram here.

Click here for Merve Ünsal’s letter, which came before, and here for Katarina Jazbec’s letter (which will be published on July 20th).

Many thanks to Manon Beury, Tudor Etchells, Emily Medd, James Medd and Melanie Healy, Rapolas Rucinskas and all those who preferred to remain anonymous, whose contributions helped make this project possible.