SAVE LETTER PROJECT
SASCHA VENTURI
Curated By Federica Viola
FRANKFURT – NOV 2025
SAVE Letter Project operates in the field of relational art and is positioned within the horizon of conceptual art. It is not an artwork to be contemplated, but one to be lived and activated. Venturi sends a white envelope containing a blank sheet, with no sender and no text, only a single word, “SAVE,” placed where the stamp would normally be, that is, the sign that enables communication.
This minimal and silent gesture triggers a perceptual short circuit: an act of apparent simplicity touches on a fundamental knot, communication and participation.
The work does not reside in the object, but in the process of activation and response it generates. The word Save is not only a faint trace that reveals the discreet presence of the artist, but also carries meanings such as preserve, guard, protect. Placed where the stamp should be, it becomes a true request: “save communication,” “save your voice”, “save the act of responding.”
In an age dominated by digital, automated communication, the project restores value to the physical, silent, and slow gesture of correspondence.
The blank sheet is pure potential: it awaits a mark, a thought, a response.
The artist withdraws; he does not impose content but creates a fertile void, a space in which reflection, gesture, and ephemeral communities of interpretation may arise.
The work lives not in the object (the envelope) but in the reactions it provokes: questions, conversations between neighbors, gestures of response.
It is an act of poetic displacement into the everyday: it brings art into the household mailbox, transforming the ordinary act of receiving a letter into an experience.
Connecting Thread of the Three Projects
In all four projects presented in the exhibition, a space of suspension is created, an intermediate, fragile, and fertile environment in which ordinary perception is interrupted. Faced with a void charged with potential, the individual is invited to question their relationship with reality, with the body, with memory, with others and with the space they inhabit.
In Solo: Proiezione, Venturi suspends the time of the image.
The work does not show what happens, but what occurs before and after the action, the invisible interval in which identity examines itself. The image is not documentation, but a mental space where personal memory and shared perception come into tension.
In Touch Me Not, the suspension is emotional and sensorial.
The image attracts and repels at the same time. It draws us closer to what we believe is familiar, only to unanchor it, rendering it simultaneously corporeal and artificial.
Confronted with these visual hybrids, the viewer is compelled to pause, to recognize the limits of perception, and to rethink the notion of “body”.
It is a void between desire and rejection, between recognition and estrangement.
In SAVE Letter Project, the suspension becomes relational.
Meaning is not given but awaited. The work is activated the moment the recipient – faced with a gesture that is unexpected and not immediately interpretable – pauses and decides how to respond.
It is a space of potential relation that demands attention, presence, and slowness.
Finally, with Pinboard Art, suspension turns spatial. The work is displaced into marginal, overlooked corners of everyday life, questioning what we consider visible or worthy of attention.
In front of Venturi’s works, the viewer cannot simply look, they must inhabit them.
The works initiate a ritual of attention, inviting us to slow down and linger at the threshold between what is known and what has not yet taken form.
His artistic research may be described as a poetics of the interval: between image and memory in Solo: Proiezione, between touch and emotional distance in Touch Me Not, between communication and silence in SAVE Letter Project, between centre and margin in Pinboard Art.
In all four cases, the artwork does not depict reality, but opens the hidden space in which what we can no longer see, feel, or say may re-emerge.
Venturi works in the suspended instant, creating experiences that do not offer answers but activate questions, reopening the possibility to see, to feel, and to communicate anew.
FEDERICA VIOLA