Abstract:
In The Letter and the Ghost, Ana Andreiolo investigates the materiality and symbolic potency of a handwritten letter, revealing it as a vestige of a spectral presence. The letter is more than text: it is body, image, and memory, traversed by time and by the action of gesture. Within its marks, folds, and stains, a ghost dwells—though not visible, it manifests itself through trace, writing, and matter. The author proposes a reading that goes beyond the verbal, exploring the sensory, tactile, and spiritual dimensions of the written object. The act of writing is performative, almost ritualistic, and handwriting becomes image, visual poetry, and an inscription of a desire for presence. By deforming, enlarging, or dissolving the word, new possibilities of meaning emerge, in which silence and absence speak louder than what is said. The letter, ultimately, is a mediator between worlds, embodying the invisible.

Thus, as one who receives a message from beyond, I opened the brown A4 envelope containing three loose sheets, written in pencil, front and back, each protected by transparent plastic and covered with firm, broad, expansive letters, written with assurance and speed. Despite being restrained by the protective plastic, I granted myself the right to touch it and to impregnate it as well with my fingerprints.

In my hands, the letter rests as visible and palpable matter. Its sheets, if they were once white, are now yellowed and stained. Time has unmistakably passed through it. It was likely stored folded, as evidenced by a clear crease line. There are also rusted marks from metal paper clips at four points on the sheets, suggesting they preserved the integrity of the set and the order of the pages for a long period. Its margins are darker, and irregularities are noticeable along one side of each sheet’s edge, as if they had been torn from a notebook. There are no ruling lines; the writing is free and loose, with well-articulated letters and sentences aligned along imaginary lines. There is no doubt that this is the handwriting of someone who mastered writing and was in great haste.

It reminded me of dictations, in which we rush to keep up with speech so as not to lose a single word along the way. The strokes of the letter “t” and the accent marks, for example, are brief. What haunted its authorship seemed to be the passing of time, which deflowered the gesture of writing and covered the surface of the paper with its skin and traces. In this way, in haste, it transfigured itself into the visible: the letter, the demarcated gesture, and the ghost—a trinity organized into unity.

A letter embodies the presence and the gesture of a ghost that wishes to be seen. It carries anima and stages the relationship between the visible and the invisible without disregarding the matter that constitutes it. It offers exposure to what goes unnoticed and memory to what is forgotten. Nevertheless, the ghost that inhabits it is not filled by letters and gestures; it remains preserved in its secret, even while inscribed in the physicality of the letter.

In this manifestation, the relationship is a borrowing of bodies, capable of sustaining the alterity of ambiguous existences. As an object of memory, it incorporates the presence of an absence and describes within itself what is veiled and hidden, also functioning as a figure of speech for animism and personification. The letter itself possesses an indivisible anima of the phantom author. Its edges demarcate two worlds—graphic lines that relate spatial and temporal dimensions. The handwriting of the lines that trace it draws marked and delimited spaces, as if small wounds on its skin, or fissures made by graphite on paper, alter its form, corrupt its matter, and introduce new residual substance. Even so, the ghost remains free and does not become imprisoned within the delimitations of flesh and lines. The graphic icon exists beyond the visual image and the inanimate; the object contains the ghost without the ghost being contained within it.