Affective Mapping

This study focuses on the contribution of the artist Joana Paraíso to the collaborative project Correspondência Cruzada (July 2023 – June 2024), undertaken with the artist Adriana Oliveira. Over fifty-two weeks, thirty-two alternating postal exchanges were carried out between Lisbon and Guimarães. Physical correspondence, adopted as a strategy for dialogue, reintroduces materiality, journey-time and location into artistic communication, countering digital immediacy. In each dispatch, Paraíso orchestrated the exterior and interior of the package through formats, colours, materials and a cartographic grid that questions belonging and displacement. The act of sending becomes a performative gesture: the marks of transport and handling inscribe a spatio-temporal narrative, adding layers of memory and fostering an affective mapping between the two cities. Conceived as a spatio-temporal entity, the project is interpreted as an affective map that, operating as a critical and poetic exercise, foregrounds the importance of time, place and collaborative gesture in constructing shared narratives and in problematising physical and symbolic displacement. Paraíso’s participation demonstrates the contemporary critical and poetic potential of postal correspondence, extending the boundaries of drawing as a research practice into territory, identity and movement.