In an increasingly digital world, the fact that Denmark Postal Service PostNord have announced that they will no longer be delivering letters is unsurprising, but nonetheless heartbreaking.
Denmark is one of the most digitalised countries in the world, with the Danish government embracing a “digital by default” policy for public communications and the fact that they are “maybe 10 years ahead” when it comes to the natural evolution of a digitalised society, according to Kim Penderson, Chief of PostNord. So the removal of a service for posting letters makes sense economically and socially.
But it doesn’t make sense to artists. The way our handwriting differs is possibly one of the most innate signs of human creativity there is. Despite letters taking days to arrive, costing money and being much less efficient than digital comms, you can’t put a price on receiving a heartfelt, handwritten letter from someone in the post.
The intimacy of knowing someone’s handwriting— recognising it on the envelope addressed to you— is a joy that comes with years of love and friendship that may soon be lost. With the move to laptops and iPads in schools and universities, and the inevitable digitalisation of society as a whole, we may never get to know and love the way our best friends write out our names.
As an artist who works often with paper, it is no surprise that Gillian Taylor made a creative response to this ‘significant moment.’ Taylor has asked people to post her letters, about anything they want, because the important part is that they have actually put pen to paper. These will be the last 400 letters ever sent by PostNord.
People wrote about their love of letters, the importance of physical media in a digital world and even recalled childhood memories of being read aloud letters by their mother before they could read. This is the kind of joy that handwritten letters bring, that will soon no longer exist.
From these letters, Taylor has fashioned paper daisies, the national flower of Denmark, and suspended them in the air. She has created a beautiful celebration of hundreds of years of letter writing and receiving, but as the daisies hang in the air like ghosts, I can’t help but feel haunted by the digitalisation of our world and the lack of value placed on the arts as a whole, as well as the way by best friend writes my name on an envelope.
“Handwritten letter from William James Rolfe, undated” by Cambridge Room at the Cambridge Public Library is marked with Public domain mark 1.0.