Letterbox - without collection

In March and April 2003 the German postal service (Deutsche Post) removed several thousand mail boxes all over Germany. Sylvie Boisseau placed a mailbox out of concrete from June 2003 until August 2004 exactly at the place where, three months before, a mailbox of the German Post was removed. Though you can put letters in, they will never be collected because our concrete mailbox is dedicated to those letters, which have been written in passion, but never been sent to anybody. During its use the mailbox became an emotional charged storage place, containing the most private in public space. It was meant as a personal relief, for a tabula rasa, a new beginning. This concrete sarcophagus can neither be opened nor does anybody know how many letters are in there. As a safe depot the mailbox was given, along with its contents, to the archeological museum of Thuringia.

With the disappearance of letter and mailbox as communication form, the never send letters will also disappear. The work “Mailbox – without collection” should serve as a participatorial monument for those letters.

Curators Birgit Schumacher and Uwe Jonas invited Sylvie Boisseau to realize a mailbox intervention under the auspices of the Gropiusstadt pilot project in Berlin. After the mailbox hung in Berlin from November 2004 to April 2005, it was given to the Museum Foundation Post and Telecommunication in Frankfurt, where it is now part of collection.