In September 2023, writer Frederic Tuten and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist met to discuss Obrist’s ongoing Post-it project and new publication Remember to Dream!.


Frederic Tuten
Why did you begin this Post-its project? When did you begin?


Hans Ulrich Obrist
Around 2012 I was making studio visits in Los Angeles with Bettina Korek and Kevin McGarry, and one of the artists we visited was Ryan Trecartin, who is an early adopter of social media and technology. He had started on Instagram very early and asked me, “Why are you not on Instagram?” So he took my phone and downloaded the app, and then posted to all his many followers that I had just joined. In a way, then, I was sort of peer pressured into using Instagram, but I didn't know what to do with it. I mean, I knew what I would not want to do. I knew I wouldn't want to post selfies, nor my food, nor my trips—none of the above. I needed to use it for something that had a vision and a necessity.

Often my projects develop organically; there isn't really a master plan but rather an evolving and self-developing movement, which I then nurture and reinforce. I went to see Umberto Eco in Milan, and it was a memorable visit. He had a whole library in his apartment that was full of books on Prague and other subjects, a separate room whose door he opened and locked behind us. It was a bit scary because it felt a bit like in The Name of the Rose. And he said, “No one ever enters this room.” He had the only key because he didn’t wany any staff or his family to enter, and he had all of these original historical manuscripts and medieval books kept there. We looked at them, and he said, “This is his handwritten material. Civilization is at risk of losing handwriting and calligraphy.” And he said, “I'm too old to start the movement, but your generation should really do something about it.” So he had given me a task, and I left his apartment slightly dizzy because I thought it was a big one.

Another month passed, and I was on vacation with the artists Koo Jeong A, Etel Adnan, and Simone Fattal in Brittany for the Christmas holiday. We went on a walk, and all of a sudden heavy rain started to pour. We had to find shelter in a small café in this tiny village. And the problem was that the rain was relentless. It would not stop. So we had a conversation that lasted about two or three hours, and after a while the inevitable happened—we went on our smartphones and started to answer a few emails and make a few calls. But Simone Fattal, who was already was in her 80s then, actually took out her notebook and start to handwrite a poem. And I had an epiphany. Remembering Eco’s task, I thought, I'm seeing artists, poets, architects, writers every day. Why don't I just ask them to handwrite sentences?

I told Eco about my idea, and he was very happy that I could protest the disappearance of handwriting. Within this homogenized, globalized reality we are living, we have lost countless things—not merely species with the extinction crisis, but also cultural phenomena. Now language is disappearing at a record pace, and the discipline of handwriting is also in danger. So my idea became a movement, one that went beyond me and had a cause, and that suddenly felt right. And it also had a very clear rule of the game, like all of my projects: to have someone write something on a Post-it, which I then post to Instagram. This has been going on for 12 years now, and it's as exciting as the first day.


Frederic Tuten
You started in 2012—so you’ve been doing this for more than ten years now. Are you going to continue? Does this project relate to others you’re doing?


Hans Ulrich Obrist
I think this project will go on forever. If it will always continue on Instagram or another platform remains to be seen, but this idea that whenever I have a meeting I ask for a handwritten sentence, that will go on. Many of my projects don't really have an end date; they just continue to evolve. I like this idea that they're long durational: they're not an event, but they develop over decades. And what also happens as you continue the project is that variations arise.

At a certain moment, maybe six years ago, I attended a conference about AI at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris. I was having lunch with Ben Vickers, Hito Steyerl, and Rachel Rose, and I asked the artists to write a sentence. Ben, the artist and technology guru who was the former Chief Technology Officer of the Serpentine, said, “This is a nice project, but you're often in the company of more than one artist, as you are here, and you should think about collectivity.” He was talking about togetherness. “So,” Ben said, “Why don't you revisit the idea of the exquisite corpse.” And now we have so far published around 200 exquisite corpses on Instagram, and there is also a book. So that grew out of my handwriting project: it's a project within a project.


Frederic Tuten
Beautiful. Let me ask you, what is your range of languages? And how many different languages are in this project?


Hans Ulrich Obrist
I record my conversations in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish, which are the five languages I'm fluent in. And this project is both a celebration a handwriting and a celebration of multilingualism. We live in a world in which it's not only the homogenized forces of globalization that lead to the disappearance of many things; it’s also the counter reaction to globalization, which produces new local isms, new nationalisms, new forms of lack of tolerance that extend to language.

So the celebration of languages that we don't speak or don't understand is very important. Recently I’ve posted many Post-its from Korea because I went to Seoul for research and visited many studios. I do encourage the artists to write on the Post-its in their mother tongue, and then if they wish we can provide a translation. The interesting thing with Instagram is that the viewers who see the Post-its online actually have different ideas about the translation, so not only do we have many languages, but very often we also have a multiplicity of translations.


Frederic Tuten
You mentioned earlier that Umberto Eco first made you aware of this fear of losing handwriting, the physical contact of pen or pencil or stylus on a surface. Do you believe handwriting may become extinct and that people will no longer use such tools for writing? And if that's the case, what would be lost? If we don't have handwriting, what’s the outcome?


Hans Ulrich Obrist
I divide my time between my digital life and my analog life. I was born in a deeply analog world, and I've spent so much time in the digital world since 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web—with the credo that it is for everyone. We all still have one foot in the analog world. But I live in this mixed reality, so while I recognize the importance of handwriting, I'm not completely sure we need to insist on its connection with analog devices, like the pen. I think of Steve Jobs who came up with this idea of distilling everything into one object, like the smartphone or the iPad, rather than a messy combo of objects. It would all be in one go. Steve Jobs never wanted to have the digital pen, you know, which many artists now use with the stylus on tablets. But I don’t necessarily think that is not a valid option.


Frederic Tuten
I’m interested in handwriting as revelation of person. I don't know if you know this, but many, many years ago, when Herman Melville was getting older, he took up handwriting lessons, because there was this theory that if you could change your handwriting, you could change your character. So Melville tried to do that. And I don't know what became of that idea in general, that if you could retrain yourself and make your sloppy, careless handwriting more fluid, readable, legible, and intelligent, you might change the nature of your personality. That's a fantastic idea. I'm curious to know if, in this project, anyone has ever tried to interpret the handwriting?


Hans Ulrich Obrist
I love that, Frederic. I mean, I have tried. As an early example: I was with the Indian painter M. F. Husain, who is often described as one of India's most important painters of the twentieth century. He lived until he was almost one hundred. And in this last meeting with him I asked him to do something for the handwriting project. He filled a page with 25 different versions of his signature, and he said, “I am many.” I love this idea that by actually learning different handwriting, we could multiply our identity. I wasn't aware of this Melville story—it's absolutely fabulous.


Frederic Tuten
I think I read about that in Melville’s letters, or maybe it's in one of the biographies. This was later in his life, when he was probably finished writing fiction and had turned to poetry. But it’s interesting to me to think that there must have been a handwriting movement at the moment, especially in New York City, where he was living. There are many kinds of quirky things that were going on in the 1890s—a lot of spiritualist activity, everything like that. Let me ask: Was anyone that you invited to participate in the project allowed to revise what they wrote? Did they have a chance to redo it?


Hans Ulrich Obrist
Very often people will write different versions and then ask me to choose. And sometimes people don’t want to write it on the spot. The whole thing is quite instantaneous, because I ask artists, writers, philosophers, and poets to write while we meet. The majority of them just do it, but some need more time and will send me a snapshot or the original Post-it later. All of these versions exist. As always, the process is very open. Sometimes people want a little bit of time and say, “Give me a half an hour,” and then we sit there and have another coffee. Sometimes there are mistakes, which just become part of it.

There’s a really interesting book by Anna Koren, The Secret Self: A Comprehensive Guide to Handwriting Analysis. She’s a handwriting expert, and she explains how the margins and pressures and sizes and shapes of handwriting are close to the inner self. It's about zones, the direction, the elaboration and simplification, the writing speed.


Frederic Tuten
Years and years ago, when I was married to my Italian wife, she was writing an article about handwriting analysis. We went to visit one of those experts living in New Jersey. We went to dinner at this woman’s house, and she said, “I'm going to give you a blank page, and you write something.” I got  nervous, because I was going to be judged by my handwriting. But I did write a paragraph. And she looked at me, smiled, and began to do a character analysis based on if I closed my circles, or if my letters leaned to the left or to the right—it was absolutely fascinating. It was actually a great psychological analysis of my being.

I think the part of the project that I'm fascinated by is not just the messages on the Post-its, which are charming and delightful and sometimes wise, but the question is, what is being revealed about that person in the writing. That's why I ask you if anyone’s allowed to do a second version or make revisions, because you would think that the first version—the spontaneous version—would be the most revelatory of character.


Hans Ulrich Obrist
Yes, and then, of course, you also have artists who create examples of automatic writing. In the realm of Surrealism, there was the exquisite corpse as a collective game, but then on a more individual basis there was automatic writing. It originated in the belief that spirits can interact with the living. Basically a writer moves their pencil without actually being conscious of writing—it's a really thrill. Some artists who do automatic writing end up developing their own language. And then you have artists like Henri Michaux, who developed entire alphabets. He's such an important reference for me in this whole project. I only wish I could have met him. But you get these whole new alphabets, new languages. The Austrian writer Clemens Setz wrote a fascinating book, The Bees and the Invisible, which has to do with the fact that Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to his translator, “We are the bees of the invisible.” That’s a very beautiful definition of invented languages.


Frederic Tuten
Speaking of Surrealism and automatic writing immediately brings to mind one of the opening passages in the great 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, which says, basically: sit down, put away all thoughts of success or fame or reputation or failure, and then have your writing materials brought to you. That means that the absolutely bourgeois Surrealist is going to sit at his desk and have his servants or his servant wife bring him pen and paper. It's hilarious. But the idea of automatic writing is putting yourself aside. You're not going to be trying to change the syntax of the language or anything. That's a very hard place to reach. It's a very, very difficult place. But it's an interesting thing to try to shed yourself of yourself.

But to turn back to the Post-its project: I think it's marvelous. Because it’s ongoing, it’s in perpetual revolution. It’s never stagnant, never codified, never ossified. It's a beautiful thing. The variety of people you’ve gathered together is wonderful, both on your Instagram and in your forthcoming book.


Hans Ulrich Obrist
I have posted thousands of Post-its now, so the one hundred in the book are a very small extract or teaser of the total. The book, published by Heni, is designed by Irma Boom. She came up with this idea whereby she typographically replicated each Post-it’s text in the style of the handwriting. So you have on the right-hand side the Post-it, and on the left-hand side is her typography experiment.


Frederic Tuten
How did the title Remember to Dream! come about?


Hans Ulrich Obrist
The artist Carrie Mae Weems wrote it. And of course, I had a period in my life in which I didn't sleep at all. During one of our earlier visits about twenty years ago, Hélène Cixous showed me a notebook that she kept next to her bed. Whenever she woke up, she would immediately write down whatever dream she had had—obviously dreams must be recorded immediately, because otherwise they dissipate or disappear. And she encouraged me to do the same thing, but she said, “In order to dream, you need to sleep a bit more.” So I started to sleep really just in order to dream more. The title ties into that, as well.


Frederic Tuten
That’s very beautiful. I also used to keep a book by my bed. I recorded hundreds of dreams. At one point I went to my analyst, and she told me not to record my dreams anymore. Why, I asked. She said it was because I was coming to her with an already edited version of the dream. I don’t know if that’s true. I should have then thought that regardless of what the dreams meant psychologically, some of them had the uncensored power of poetry. Are these Post-its related to poetry? Can they be read as poems?


Hans Ulrich Obrist
Yes, I've always believed in that bridge crossing art and poetry. I'm from Zurich, the city of Dada, where poets and artists were together. The same is true for Surrealism. Some of these short texts do go in the direction of poems. Sometimes they include instructions, or sometimes there are doodles with the writing, so you get this wonderful combination of drawing and text. But I want to know from you, Frederic, about your handwriting. First of all, which pens do you use? What is the role of handwriting in your work? And also, how has the computer changed the way you work?


Frederic Tuten
Well, before the computer there was the typewriter. I wrote my first two novels with a typewriter. And I remember writing by hand and then sending the text to someone to transcribe and type for the publishers. Then the computer came into my life, and what the computer freed me of was the really slow and onerous process of revision on paper. Now we have spell check and all that stuff, and we don't have to worry about it. But some of my friends still wrote by hand. Susan Sontag did—she had a beautiful Montblanc pen that she would use not only when she was at her desk but also when she was traveling. After she died, her son sent me a little package. And in it he said Susan would have liked for me to have her pen. So now I have her traveling pen, and I treasure it. It’s my habit just to hold it to feel close to her.

As for myself, I am currently starting a new novel and finishing another novel. And I find, when I look at a page that I've printed out from the computer, that suddenly something will happen to me. I take a disposable pen—I have thousands of these little pens—and I look at a passage closely. For example, yesterday I was looking at a moment in one of the novels where I write, “they got into the cab.” And I look at the passage and I think, that's not good enough. That's too soft, too easy. It's just a mechanical thing, that “got into a cab.” And it’s because I am looking at it with my pen that I can then write in the margin, “They got into the cab, and the driver turned around and took her hand and brushed it with his lips in the manner of a courtier of the seventeenth century. And suddenly, Columbo began to play one of his violin pieces, and the vibrations went from the cab to the Earth to the Moon.” That never would have happened with the computer—I never could have thought of that because I never could have felt it. In this novel, a woman is in love with a Spanish painter who is in prison, and she writes to him every day. She makes sure she writes to him with a pen, because she wants him to feel her impress, her person, on every word, on every letter. That is to say, she wants him to feel the connection of the hand to the page, the ink to the page, the pressure on certain words. She is giving her heart to him in writing. So it's apropos for me that we're talking about this subject now. It really is part of what I've been thinking about in my work and in general.


Hans Ulrich Obrist
I am also interested in—if we go back to this idea of text and image being connected—the artists who are also writers, and the writers who are also artists. There is, of course, a long history of that. When I was a teenager in Switzerland, I met the late playwright Eugène Ionesco, who was in his seventies. We had a coffee and, all of a sudden, he started drawing. He was actually almost more fascinated by his drawing practice. You, too, have been drawing and painting alongside your writing. I remember when we went to restaurants in Paris in the early 2000s with Karen Marta, and you would draw portraits. And now something rather major has happened whereby you’ve jumped into painting.


Frederic Tuten
You know, they called marijuana a gateway drug, and I would say that drawing is a gateway drug to painting. You sort of glide into it. And when you talk about painting and words—there is such a goldmine there, from Van Gogh including books with their titles on them in his works, or Baldessari painting texts on his canvas. There is so much to know and to learn about and be part of. And I go back to this again, not to flatter you—but this is a wonderful project. It's fresh, original, and pertinent. You are asking people to come out of themselves for a moment and disclose themselves. I appreciate that so much, and I'm sure others, many more than myself, do, too.


Hans Ulrich Obrist
Thank you so much, Frederic. This was a wonderful conversation. I'm deeply grateful.