Instantaneous nostalgia for the future: 10,000 postcards for 2042

Abstract

This article focuses on analogue postcards as a communicative and artistic tool for potentially engaging nostalgically with the past, present, and future. It poses questions about the experience of time and place in a specific setting (the city of Montreal, Canada), as well as in a specific project that looks at cultural mediation in public spaces. During the summer of 2017, Comptoir public, an organization that works with artists and cultural mediators, launched the project “Postes du futur” ( Mail from the Future). The organizers asked Montrealers to write a postcard to a recipient of the sender's choosing, so that it will be mailed in 2042 during the celebration of Montreal's 400th anniversary (i.e., 25 years later). One of our main findings is that most of these postcards will be sent to the current addresses of future recipients. Choosing one's home as one of the settings to write to and to write about finally made it possible to connect to the historical and medical meaning of nostalgia: the homesickness, the yearning for a place of one's own, for a space we now miss prospectively on in the future. Home, where people live their lives, is not yet “lost” or “left behind.” But anticipating its loss and transfer to others becomes one of the primordial factors shaping instantaneous nostalgia and its expression—a future in which postcard senders are no longer present or even alive. The issue of the finiteness and the irreversibility of time is usually an indicator of past-oriented nostalgia. In our case, it is projected toward the future. The printed, analogue postcard becomes the writing space that leaves room for anticipated and anticipatory nostalgia and for imagining future communication technologies.