Naoyuki Kiyota

The Compass Letters were produced on the uninhabited island of Örö in Finland from the end of December 2021 to the beginning of February 2022, and 100 of them were sent around the world. These letters help evoke the presence of the sender, someone (at this time, me) who lives on the same earth as you, even though you cannot see each other and there is a great distance between you. As the name suggests, the letters bear a compass, which is designed to point only to the island of Örö from the recipient’ address. The blue tip of the arrow always indicates the direction of the sender, where the letter physically came from. The opposite side shows the direction from the sender’s location to your own. Regardless of its current position in space, the letter records the relative positions of the correspondents at the time the letter was sent. To protect the delicate compass, I wrapped the letters in frottages that I collected on my daily walks during my stay on Örö, so that the recipient of the letter would experience in some way the unique world of the island. Burying over paper placed against Örö’s natural features, the isle’ unique textures were collected in an environmentally friendly manner. In this way, during a stay of around two months between 2021-2022, 100 letters were sent to various parts of the world with the help of the M/S Stella ferry and Posti, which visit the island every Thursday.

“From the unimaginable territory of Örö island, I want to send many conceptual letters around the world.” During my stay on the isle of Örö, I created a new series of experimental works that consisted of sending letters and postcards that possess an essence not found in ordinary letters or postcards. I see the works as a new means of visual communication, and am continuing to develop them. My main theme is to measure the world by my own system and to record it with my own measuring device. And, since the letters evoke the situation at the time of writing, they are consequently one of the devices of my research. Letters and postcards, though historical recorders of the world through the human mind, remain with certain conceptual limitations that prevent certain feelings and thoughts from being expressed visually. For that which is invisible and inexpressible in the letter or postcard itself, I will design a form and/or an experience that can express such things. The physicality of the letter, in contrast to digital mediums, allows for a thorough investigation of how to transfer an immaterial feeling from one location to another. This essence is in a way the spirit of the letter or postcard that I design and transform into a written or visual message. Unlike an email or a WhatsApp message, where our feelings are freshly translated into words and content, in a letter time plays a role in translating the feeling into a written/graphic object. Thus, my intention is to attach to the letter the expression of the feeling, time and environment behind the message.

Until 2015, Örö Island was sealed off, and unlike New York or Tokyo, we don’t have much information about it. For me, this makes the island the ideal environment for my creation. Because it is mysterious. If there is not much information about the island, the recipient of the letter must imagine the island from the visual medium I create. Observing and measuring the reaction of the recipient of my letter would provide the perfect opportunity to measure the power of the experimental visual communication expressed in my letter. As expected, I was deeply inspired by the unimaginable territory of Örö, by its materials and history, and it was the ideal place to create new forms of visual communication from a distance. From this experience, the project and work Compass Letter was born.