Category: To whomever

To whomever. According to Artur

Let’s hear it for Artur Poças, the latest participant of To Whomever and one of the students at the course I’m teaching with Ana Betancour. Who could ever guess that there’d be so different takes on what this project was about? Thanks for the contribution, and email me your address – sending stuff by post has a nice haptic feel to it.

My name is Mathew Price. I came to Europe very early in my life and now I’m living in this small boring town where nothing attracts me more than my own room or the beautiful fingertips of my girlfriend, Therese.

Day one

My twin brother came to live with me. He left our parents house, I did the same some years ago and, apparently, the reason is the same, he became a vegetarian and our father told him: “if you want to eat plants, go to live in the garden, there are plenty of them”.

After so many years, his voice still echoes inside my head.

The good thing is that I found a job for my brother at the school, is going to teach with me, starting tomorrow.

One week later

First day at work, my brother fucked my girlfriend in our dirty bathroom at school. She thought he was me (eight years together and she doesn’t know I don’t wear silk underwear). He didn’t think at all. I broke up with both.

After all

Today I received the news by mail. She’s pregnant. Therese. For many years we tried an absurd amount of times to conceive a human being. Never succeeded. The fucker comes from the other side of the world and, with just one shot, guess what?

Twins

To whomever. According to Olle

I don’t know what Olle has against people who don’t speak Swedish, but he contributed to the whomever project with a short biography in Swedish. The image is in the mail. Thank you Sir:

Bilden är tagen 1996 och publicerades i nöjesbilagan till Turku sanomat. Mannen på bilden uppgav sig heta Hasse Wigeèr och vara från Umeå. Bilden presenterades som en mingelbild vid en konsert med artisten Jimmie Tenor.

Några veckor senare ringer någon till redaktionen på Turku Sannomat och uppger att mannen på bilden inte är Hasse Wigeer utan istället föreställer den fd. rallyföraren Terje Vissää. Terje var känd för sin orädda och aggressiva stil på banan och prisades av president Kekkonen för sina insatser inom rallysporten. Terje var även känd för sitt hårda leverne och sitter i rullstol sedan en han onykter kraschat med sin motorcykel 1989. Terje var tidigare ett känt ansikte i Turkus nöjeliv, men har sedan kraschen inte synts offentligt fram till att denna bild publicerades. Vi önskar Terje välkommen tillbaka.

To whomever. According to Tobias

A while back I got a respons to the “To Whomever” thing. Instead of writing a letter to the person in the picture, Tobias wrote a short biography. Much appreciated. If you would like to participate, please check out the original post and send a letter to the person you imagine is in the photo. Include a postal address and I’ll send a copy signed in character – A perfect decoration for any fridge. The image below is on its way to Tobias.

Vold Streckzy is in a direct descending way related to Nedeljko Cabrinovic, the biggest klutz in history. Vold himself does not know this. But to a person having this knowledge when looking upon Vold it makes perfect sense.

Vold always has a look of fear in his eyes. He’ve had this ever since he was a small boy living in the outskirts of Sarajevo where he one day due to a series of highly unlikely events fell of his tricycle. After tumbling down a rocky slope with thorny bushes for a good 5 minutes he ended up in a sheep den. As he had a considerable amount of vertical velocity he got stuck waist-high in sheep droppings. Given the sheep being startled and that Vold had the shame of his ancestor hanging upon him, the sheep attacked. Then after dodging hooves for what seemed like the better part of his childhood his mother came and dragged him out.

After the incident they moved to Turkey but the ill-omen resting upon Vold never seized tormenting him. He has been on the move ever since. Hence the constant fear in his eyes.

Summer project: To whomever

Petter took a picture of me last weekend, and I liked it a lot; For once I didn’t immediately recognise the person in the picture, but rather saw someone older, more tired, more drunk and in a jacket that doesn’t seem to fit. It’s easy to construct a story about someone when you’re people-watching in a park, or see images of them on tv or in a paper, but it’s seldom that you get to have that distance to yourself.

We joked that it looked like a self-promotional one, the “spontaneous” and “real” image you might see actors sign to hang on the wall of a local bar, or send to fans. And thus I decided to turn this into a small project to occupy my unemployed time.

I’d people to send letters addressed to whomever they think that the person in the picture is.

Write him an email for whatever reason; maybe he had a walk-on role in a movie you like and you’re collecting all the autographs from the cast; perhaps he was in a band fifteen years ago and you’re wondering when the next record is coming out; did he drive a car across twelve state lines in the longest car chase ever showed on COPS; is he the only member of an Esperanto club on an island you’re planning to visit, and does he speak English at all?

Make up a story, name, whatever, and I’ll try to reply to the emails in character. The first twenty or so emails will get a personalised and signed photo if you include an address. (I can’t really afford more than that) Should this project generate more than that amount of mail, I’ll reply by email. (if you’d like a reply at all, that is) If you don’t want your real name revealed, (or your using a pen name) let me know somewhere in the email, otherwise I’ll put it up in the post. To participate, send an email to: to_whomever@monocultured.com

All emails and replies will end up as individual posts on my blog, and there’s a feed tracking just those posts here: https://monocultured.com/blog/?feed=rss2&cat=314?

—[update]—

I’ve modified the text above for clarities sake. Also, I’ve been told that this endeavor might seem megalomaniac, but since when can’t megalomaniacs have fun?