Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>
To: Mitchel Cumming <█████████████████████ >
dear Mitchell,
I hope you have been having a good summer-winter. Since we last wrote, I have continued working on the publication and determining the frame of the archive.
I am writing now, in extension and somewhat as a consequence of our last exchanges.
The dénouement of our conversation was revelatory, to the extent that it brought to light the contiguity of our subject matter and our own capacities. We are not just discussing artistic-administrative burnout, we are living it.
I recognized, through our discussion, as I might have already mentioned, that practically everyone invited into the project was experiencing something similar: a real paralysis, a paralysis of productivity caused by an unimaginably real reality that was immovable, no matter how much we tried to animate our work with love and use that love as a force to motivate further work.
I am writing to you now because these thoughts have coalesced into a strategy to approach the project archive. I have been at work compiling an exhaustive archive composed of the emails constitutive of the project and the publication. These include auto-correspondence with funding agencies, and personal responses of friends to the work and performances. These also include, as you no doubt have inferred, our own correspondence.
I am writing now to ask if you would, I hope, consent to allowing me to reproduce our emails. The archive will be published online, in tandem with the printed volume of critical texts framing the project gesture. I have attached a file of exactly that correspondence. I intend to redact your personal email address, and can delete further information if there is anything you would prefer to not reach the (very small) public (who might be interested in this publication to the extent that they will read through the almost 1500 emails it will comprise). Please let me know if you consent to this use of your emails. Please also let me know if you wish for certain specific content to be redacted, or complete emails. I will comply with your requests. I have no interest in publishing anything without the consent of my correspondents.
Many thanks again,
in friendship,
Josh