"People are eager to receive letters again, and also to write them"

For a few months now, I've been looking forward to checking the mailbox again. Sometimes I stand in front of it and open it. Other times, I glance at it with the hope of finding what I'm waiting for. There are days when it even plays tricks on me, making me believe that what I'm waiting for has already arrived, and when I open it, I only find a bill or an advertising flyer. Those responsible for suddenly having this "dependence" on the mailbox – until a few days ago I didn't know this could happen to me – are the illustrator Laura Agustí (Barcelona, 1980) and the photographer Arnau Sidera (Vic, 1985).

Both have created El club del Mirlo, a subscription to mail letters that they send from Nevà, a small village in Ripollès where they moved three years ago after being victims of gentrification in the Sant Antoni neighborhood of Barcelona. But they are not just any letters. "Besides the letter where I explain something, we also include a postcard or print, stickers, and some extra detail," explains Laura. These correspondence clubs that are now beginning to arrive in our country are very common in countries like Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, or Canada. They are called snail mail and they seek to revive postal mail, now that it is in decline due to email.

A totally manual process

The Mirlo club is, therefore, “a desire to return to the analog,” explains Arnau. “Each letter is prepared one by one: folding the paper, putting in the postcard, the sheets, the stickers, closing the envelope, sticking on the stamp…”. But how is everything inside decided? That's up to Laura, who is the one who writes and designs everything they put in, always “with a lot of creative freedom.” It's all so well thought out that she even illustrates the stamps herself: “I didn't even know that custom stamps could be designed. We discovered it thanks to our postwoman”.

The letters are written from a place of closeness, as if they were sent to a friend. In fact, it's not surprising to find the most intimate confessions in them. "We told the people at the Mirlo Club, before many friends, that we had gotten married," explains Laura, laughing. "We didn't want to repeat what can already be seen on Instagram, but rather show another side of ourselves," adds Arnau. And it is that for both of them it was very important to recover the feeling of those letters that we all wrote to each other when we were little and when email was science fiction.

An opportunity to connect with the present

In a time when we live glued to screens, dependent on algorithms, and with social media notifications as the soundtrack to our lives, both wanted to offer a moment of pause to their recipients – yes, the majority of us are women! –. “Many people tell us that when they receive the notification that the letters have been sent, they decide to wait until the weekend to open them calmly,” explains Laura emotionally. And as Arnau says, El Club del Mirlo “recovers something that today we have almost lost: patience. Because some letters arrive in three days and others take three weeks”. In short, a unique opportunity to work on uncertainty, waiting, and patience in the age of Amazon and Ali Express.

Being part of this correspondence club is an invitation to live in the present, to capture a moment, to recover the analog life that many of us have lost. “People not only wanted to receive correspondence, but also to write back,” assure Laura and Arnau. Since last February when they sent the first letter (they send them every two months to about a thousand people), they have started to “receive letters back, postcards, or photographs”. They have also discovered in younger generations what sending letters is all about: “A very young girl wrote to us because she didn’t know how to send a letter. She had never sent one. She asked us where she should buy the stamp and where she should take it. It left us very surprised”.

Perhaps, thanks to them, this summer the youngest will send their first letter or there will be those who will send postcards again with the excitement of surprising someone who no longer checks the mailbox.