Set in the time between ancient and contemporary Central Asia, ‘The Middles’ is the name of an imagined post office for undeliverable written correspondence. In English, the term for such a place is a ‘dead letter office.’ However, the letters found at The Middles are not at all ‘dead.’ These letters wait in feverish limbo for their discovery, anxious to resolve, rejoin, and renew writer with recipient.

The setting for these illustrated fictions is the vectors of the Silk Road emanating from Khojand (a city located in modern-day Tajikistan) towards today. Stretching over topography and time, these letters define the contours of the in between—The Middles. The letters, sent between characters along the Silk Road (e.g., camileers, merchants, rogues, scribes) invoke the travails and adventures of life during the height of the Sogd empire, a near-extinct ethnic group that preceded what is now Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Like 1001 Arabian Nights, The Middles is a ‘frame tale’: its overarching narrative of modern-day archaeologists piecing together fragments of the ancient, undeliverable correspondence, frames the vignettes and adventures of characters living at the time of the Silk Road. For example, one letter features a shepherd and post-man scribe whose collaborative drawings of regional beasts suggest a friendship based on a delight in otherness: “The postman-scribe, enchanted by tales of beasts that lived where the written word did not, would label the drawings, matching image with words as if teaching the words for the previous night’s dreams.” The letters are mailed to the lonely shepherd so that he can, like everyone else, receive mail.

Recalling the twists of an O. Henry-esque tale, another letter describes the treasured correspondence between a woman and her sentinel-husband that were burned in a signal-fire lit to warn of enemy encroachment. A comrade writing to the woman laments the immolation of the letters and the significance of the sacrifice: “The ashes of your letters I keep for myself, reminders of word and will.”

A final series of letters written between a scribe and a postwoman draws from an actual historical event—the incursion of the Arabs into the region in the 7th century CE and the destruction of all things written in the indigenous (Sogd) alphabet. While actually the Sogd written tradition effectively disappeared at this historical moment, in The Middles a series of letters do evade this near-obsolescence; in these letters, the writing resembles images—clouds, flocks, blossoms, music—thus wedding written and visual language.

The enigmatic letters discovered at The Middles are analogous to the lapses and tangles in human communication that continue despite changes in communication technology.

About this project
The Middles is a project that sprung from the Global ArtsLab, an initiative of CEC Artslink. The Global ArtsLab seeks to expand global cultural dialogue by engaging with communities that may have been previously marginalized, by presenting their perspectives and understandings to new audiences and expanding an appreciation of these ideas through international collaboration and artistic practice. The projects’ objectives are to provide ways of connecting with community or illustrating social processes that may help organizations or efforts aimed at expanding opportunities, correcting social injustices or generally to foster a greater sense of collective engagement.

CEC ArtsLink is an international arts organization whose programs encourage and support exchange of artists and cultural managers between the United States and Eastern and Central Europe, Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus. CEC Artslink believes that the arts are a society’s most deliberate and complex means of communication, and that artists and arts administrators can help nations overcome long histories of reciprocal distrust, insularity and conflict. www.cecartslink.org