Sorry I didn’t send these is a body of graphic design and visual communication work by Alessandra Vargas. Using typography, publication design, material experimentation and photography, Vargas investigates the search for closure, the processing of grief outside the context of death, and the implications of bringing private life into the public sphere.
Built around a collection of unsent letters and journal entries, the project uses a visual language developed from [and later reinstalled among] discarded ephemera collected across the London neighbourhood integral to the relationship Vargas was mourning. The choice of location is integral to the work: its everyday debris became a material record of a relationship that had left few physical traces of its own. Sorry I didn’t send these encourages viewers to contemplate the deaths of their own relationships and whether they have ever truly reached closure.
Vargas developed a typographic system in which each passage borrows the visual conventions of the object carrying it. A confession initially resembles a public notice, advertisement, receipt, or piece of rubbish; its private meaning emerges only through a second look. Typography becomes both camouflage and delayed disclosure, controlling when and how the writing is encountered.
The designed excerpts were applied or printed directly onto each object and then photographed in situ without digital compositing. These photographs were translated into a four-colour Risograph-printed 52 page book and paired with the complete passages in Vargas’s handwriting. This creates two readings of the same text: first as graphic language that disguises its true source, then as handwriting that reveals its origin.
Understanding the letter as both message and object of recognition, Sorry I didn’t send these treats design as a method of transmission rather than simply a means of illustrating heartbreak. The audience becomes the recipient, the witness. Public formats offer an alternative method of sending these unsent excerpts out into the world, and back to the persons who they were written for, intertwining personal reflection with the varied collective understanding of previous losses.
Complete scan of the book are available on request.
Further references:
Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With 1963 - 1995, Tracey Emin.
Take Care of Yourself, Sophie Calle.
Mourning Sex, Peggy Phelan.
I Love Dick, Chris Kraus.