Spelling of thought: Carta ao pai, by Elida Tessler

Carta ao pai, de Elida Tessler

Abstract

This article aims to reflect with and about the artwork Carta ao pai (2015) [Letter to his father], by the visual artist Elida Tessler, whose artistic thought is built on the borders between literature and visual arts, image and word. In this work, inspired by Franz Kafka's book, with the same title, the artist also addresses her own father, but in a spelling without an alphabet, a spelling built in and with the thought that the act of writing can be made in other ways, by other means. In dialogue with Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, among other thinkers, we analyze Tessler's writing as a failed letter, pure contingency, that will never reach its destination, but which, by addressing to the father's body-memory, can provoke an opening of meanings, in a poetic gesture of forwarding between the limit and the impossible.