The Black Box New York held recordings of the performance The Letter by Tadeusz Kantor from 1967
(with voices of Zbigniew Gostomski, Edward, Krasiński, Wiesław Borowski, Mariusz Tchorek)

The sound installation was part of the show Skład pamięci by Keta Gavasheli.

In 1967, Tadeusz Kantor tasked eight postmen with the job of carrying an unusually large letter (two meters high and fourteen meters long) from the Main Post Office in Ordynacka Street through the streets of Warsaw. The post men were dressed in postal uniforms, and they were accompanied by policemen on their journey. The event lasted two and a half hours and ended at the Foksal Gallery, to which the letter was addressed. Kantor was a renowned theatre director, professional painter, assemblage artist, avant garde set designer, art theorist, happenings artist, actor, and a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.

He was a founder of both the second Cracow Group, gathering key avant-garde figures in post-war Polish art, and Cricot 2, one of the most significant experimental theatres in the world. In Kantor’s rich oeuvre – voices, sounds, and their afterlives – make up a crucial tissue of his artistic legacy.

To Kantor, a letter is a crossed object that opens the perspective of the “impossible”, which this time was emphasized by an aura of the unknown. The author assigned himself the role of inconn – the mysterious addressee of the message that justified the size of the letter and was never disclosed – Joanna Mytkowska, Director of The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.