Artists install portal to address isolation
Crew behind golden Santa Rosa mailbox sends replies to anxious correspondents
“Thank you for our mail.” — Kyle
“Kyle, Saying thank you is one of the best gifts you can ever give a person.” — Portal Professionals
In the middle of Old Courthouse Square in downtown Santa Rosa, there’s the familiar outline of a mailbox — the foursided receptacle on four legs, with an arched top. Only this one is goldcolored.
It was placed there by the United States Portal Service.
A sign nearby explains: “Please submit your questions, grievances and love letters to the past and future here.” If you include a return address, you’ll get a response by standard mail from one of 33 “Portal Professionals,” who range in age from 3 to 79. If you don’t include a return address, “a cosmic response will be issued.”
The project, part of Santa Rosa’s Open & Out program that closed three blocks of Fourth Street for
“Dear future, we hope that the smoke goes away and that we take better care of the forest.”
— Ella
“My view of the future, in particular, is different each split second that I peer out my portal window.”
— Portal Professionals
“Dear future, Will you be there for my kids?”
— All Moms
outdoor dining and other activities, is a coronavirusera collaboration of city residents Jessica Rasmussen, Anna Wiziarde and Julian Billotte.
“A large part of the project — and using a fullsize, real mailbox — was to show reverence for the institution of the USPS,” Billotte says.
The trio wanted to stick up for the U. S Postal Service, which has been politicized and seen its funding jeopardized as more voters cast their ballots by mail this year. That’s also why they chose gold. ( It helped that Billotte and Wiziarde are gilders and had a drawer full of spare imitation gold leaf, or Dutch metal.)
The idea also came from Rasmussen’s experience sending letters to friends during the pandemic. “A couple weeks would go by, and the whole world would change by the time we would get each other’s letters,” she says. Each one was a time capsule from earlier in the month — “a. k. a. a whole world ago.”
Outside of the portal, Rasmussen is a multimedia artist specializing in found objects as well as a member of the Imaginists theater company.
The goal of the portal, which will be in place through Dec. 4, is to be “a touchstone for people that are feeling isolated,” Wiziarde says. “It’s a way to communicate.”
Since the portal was installed on Sept. 4, most of the letters submitted have been addressed to the future, not the past. “Everyone’s feeling uncertain with the pandemic, the election, climate change,” Rasmussen says of the trio’s
“I can imagine you wearing your work gloves and a sun hat, carrying your shovel to plant trees and shrubs on the river bank.”
— Portal Professionals
choice of prompt.
“The pandemic, the onset of it, was just profoundly disruptive to our sense of time,” she adds. “I don’t think that’s good or bad; it’s just really unexpected and something that we haven’t grappled with before. Me turning that disruption into a portal is a way for me to play with it and think about it and accept it.”
Letters have been handwritten, and they’ve mostly addressed collective concerns rather than personal ones. The Portal Professionals are free to respond as they choose, but the Portal’s Instagram account speaks in what Rasmussen calls“a playfully government sounding voice” — a bit like the way elves in Santa’s Workshop might speak.
As for what a cosmic response might look like, Rasmussen offers this example: “One of the letter writers I knew. It was a dear friend. She wrote from the voice of all moms with her concern about the future for her kids.
“I was talking to her later on the phone, and she said, ‘ As I was writing it, I realized moms have always been worried like this and always felt this way about the future,’ I teased her: I said, ‘ Damn, that cosmic response works fast!’
“People writing with real intention — I don’t think we’re in charge of that cosmic response,” Rasmussen adds. “I think it’s just coming to them.”
The trio embraces the theatricality of emptying the portal at pickup time every day, wearing hard hats for the excursion. As of Oct. 1, they hadn’t yet received letters about the Glass Fire; Rasmussen suspects this is because Santa Rosa residents are still too immersed in it to write about it.
Yet since the fire broke out, she’s noticed a shift in herself as mail collector.
“Before the Glass Fire broke out, I was giddy and excited to check ( the portal) every day,” Rasmussen says. “Now with the oppressive thick smoke and ash everywhere, I don’t want to leave my house. And the portal mail collection is all I go out for. Instead of playing, I have more of a sense of duty about it. The experience has been reminding me of the USPS unofficial motto: ‘ Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.’ ”
Coincidentally, the project has brought Rasmussen her own cosmic response, of a sort.
“On a very, very personal level,” she says, “my biological father has gotten in touch with me after 30 years of me not being in touch with him. My mom said to please not open any more portals.”