Send us a postcard!
The following postcards are created from a conversation between the Blog x Jija Sohn, an artist in residency at Lavanderia a Vapore. Our chat was mediated by the Mobilising Words1 card game and unfolded into a playful and imaginative sharing of our (Estonian and Japanese-Korean) cultural backgrounds: an unfinished attempt to reimagine protection from the point of view of collectivity and sharing.
The postcards are invitations for you to join our conversation,
to play with us,
to imagine with us.
Send us a postcard
with your thoughts,
random words,
foggy images,
flashing references
or songs.
What comes up?
Kadri: Maybe I told you this story from the last time I visited Estonia: we did this public space residency. When walking around, I saw a lot of “private property” signs.
Jija: Ah, yes.
Kadri: “Private property!”, which communicates this imperative, like a stop, “don’t enter!”.
Jija: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s private property, don’t enter.
Kadri: I think it comes from this wish to separate and protect what is mine so it’s not mistaken as “ours”. I remember we spoke about it. In Italy I haven’t seen so many signs like this and I’ve been thinking about this from a post-soviet perspective: a sign of history where people’s property was forcefully collectivized.
Jija: Yes.
Kadri: And… But…
But the cards talk about… One’s origin, where you come from.
It’s not necessarily what you own, is it?
Jija: No, because it doesn’t mean you own the origins. But it also depends what we mean by origins. Is it a place, is it a sense, sensations, awareness?
Kadri: Yes.
Kadri: Reading these cards, I ask – could it be possible to reimagine the idea of “protection” that traditionally, it’s tied to property, economy, ownership. We build walls to protect what we own, to keep others out.
Is there is a different way of protecting when we shift the focus to our origins—our sense of belonging?
Jija: Protecting so that nobody harms you?
Kadri: Like, how do we protect these things? And does this type of protection allow us to rethink… The normative, like… How do we protect something like a sense of origin or belonging?
Jija: Exactly. So it doesn’t have to be these borders… You don’t have to “own” your place. It can also belong to others.
Kadri: For example to me, I’ve noticed that to me protecting where I come from—it’s through sharing it. I protect my roots when I speak about them, when I open them up to others. That’s how it becomes something alive.
Jija: Yes, it becomes something energetic, but also relational. It’s about the people who recognize and share that origin with you. Like someone saying, “Ah, you’re from Estonia!”—that’s a kind of imaginative link, a shared memory or association.
Kadri: Yes.
Jija: It’s like saying hello to a sibling you didn’t know you had. There’s something familial in it.
Kadri: It reminds me of your hotpot evenings. That, too, is a way of sharing where you come from.
Jija: Yes, and sharing taste.
Kadri: Sharing taste.
Jija: Yes. It’s true. And…
How…
But this is also… Wow, this is also nice. Like, now you said about the hotpot, and this is kind of like a metaphor for shared waiting. How we eat. How do we start and how we end to eat. How we wait.
Right. I just realized—it’s not only about eating. It’s the time we take. Waiting together. Something slowly forming.
Kadri: Oh!
Would you say the hotpot is that time?
Jija: It’s a collective moment of waiting. Something begins to take shape. It’s more than food. Maybe the hotpot is a metaphor for gatherings. Hmm.
Kadri: Do you want to open this a bit?
Jija: Yeah, actually, because it’s like creating a different… …stage. Because it’s on the table, and you are together.
It’s different from making soup in the kitchen, out of sight. With hotpot, it’s on the table, in front of everyone.
There’s fire. There is movement. Smells!
Kadri: The smells!
Jija: Yes. And everything goes in—meat, fish, vegetables. It all cooks together. Meanwhile, people are talking: “Cheers! How was your day?”
“Oh, busy. But now…”
Then something starts to bubble, to boil.
Smoke rises.
It becomes ready.
Kadri: Yes.
Jija: And there’s that moment: It’s ready.
Soup is ready.
Kadri: Soup is ready.
Jija: And it wouldn’t cook the same if we weren’t there together.
The hotpot needs us gathered around it. That’s the whole point.
It’s completely different otherwise.
1Mobilising Words is card game that gathers the collectively built knowledge between parters and local communities of the On Mobilisation2 project and offers practical, poetic, and political insights into mobilising communities through culture, care, and creativity.
The game models a form of collective inquiry where words are not just linguistic units but tools for sense-making, reflection, and transformation.
It is available to download HERE!
2On Mobilisation is a project that from April 2023 continued over two years, focussing on community mobilisation through artistic processes.
With Lavanderia a Vapore as one of the partners (among wpZimmer, Baltic Art Center, Studio ALTA, and the two associated partners: Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts and Uppsala University Graduate School in Sustainability Studies), the main objective of the project was to respond to the need for transnational creation and circulation of knowledge through capacity bulding.
To celebrate the conclusion of the project in May 2025, there are now published two instruments – the On Mobilisation Toolkit and the Mobilising Words card game to share the knowledge that emerged from the project with the public.
Article by Kadri Sirel