Umberto Eco alerted me early on to the importance of handwriting. In 2009, he told The Guardian: ‘The art of handwriting teaches us to control our hands and encourages hand-eye coordination. It obliges us to compose the phrase mentally before writing it down. Thanks to the resistance of pen and paper, it makes one slow down and think.’

Today, with the hypervelocity of images and text circulating in our world, handwriting has become endangered. But, as Etel Adnan said, ‘if we lose handwriting, we lose an enormous amount of meaning, because writing and drawing are an art. Something written by hand says more than just words – it reflects a psychological state.’

The notion of slowing down and thinking deeply connects to the practices of Park Seo-Bo and Irma Blank. When I visited them, it was towards the end of their lives. I wanted to know about their beginnings, how they had come to the form of writing and mark making they brought into painting.

For Irma Blank, it began in Syracuse, Italy. She was from Germany, and very lonely. She was acutely aware of the limits of language, so she started to make signs, to conjure up something that reached beyond language. This led to what she called the ‘Eigenschriften’, the self-writings, which she became known for, and lasted for 10 years. They had nothing to do with the outside world. They were monastic, almost ascetic. She described them as both a declaration and a denial, offering viewers a way to project themselves into the text. In this sense, they function like mirrors. The ‘Eigenschriften’ were also about the impossibility of language to fully capture what we feel. She wanted to find the answers to some questions, but sometimes there is no answer – and these are the most important questions. She told me, ‘As long as we are looking, we are alive.’

Later, when Blank moved to Milan, she found herself in a new context, surrounded by artists. Her work shifted. She moved from ‘Eigenschriften’ to ‘Trascrizioni’, where sound became important. She was looking for a quicker mark, because the self-writings were slow, meticulous, almost devotional. With ‘Trascrizioni’, she started documenting the sound of writing itself. She even recorded the process, the movement of the pen on the surface. It was the sound of silence, very John Cage.

Then, later in life, the work became more autobiographical. Blank made works called ‘Gaze’ and ‘Walking’. She worked on her knees, but eventually, the works became too small – there was a physical limit. This, in turn, led to the ‘Radical Writings’, where the reduction continued. In a way, her entire practice is about reduction. A desire to reach nothingness – but, as she explained to me, a nothingness that is experienced, embodied. A space that breathes.

Minimal poetry was always at the core of her work. There was never an end to her experimentation. She also made the ‘Urschrift’ series, where she used both her left and right hands to write simultaneously. And, like Friedrich Rückert, Hildegard von Bingen, or Luigi Serafini, she even invented her own alphabet – except hers had only eight letters, semiconsonants, so it could be spoken.

What do all these works all have in common? They are all about the passing of time. She said her project was to have written her life. They are a diary of sorts, and this idea of the diary leads us to Park Seo-Bo, whom I interviewed in Seoul in 2023.

Park told me that, in the beginning, he was ‘a man of many desires.’ His early work was highly expressive, almost aggressive. The idea of the wall was very important, as was the idea of intense pain that he channeled through the work, almost using art as healing. The wall, the repetition, the pain – it all became part of a process.

I was fascinated by how his ‘Écriture’ series began. It came out of a crisis, a deep creative and personal crisis. He told me that one day, he saw his second son – who was very small at the time, maybe 3 years old – climb onto his older brother’s desk. The boy started writing words in a gridded notebook. One character per box, one after another. But then he erased what he had written. And because he was not holding the paper tightly, it crumpled. He tried again. It crumpled again. Frustrated, he scribbled all over the page. And then he gave up. In that moment, Park had a revelation. This was what he had been looking for: the act of resignation. The experience of erasure, of failure, of letting go. So he began to emulate that. This became ‘Écriture’ – a process of writing, erasing, repeating. He described it as a way of emptying the self. A kind of self-cultivation, like Buddhist chanting.

In 1955, Park met a female monk, Kim Il-Job, who told him to take a Buddhist sculpture home and repeat the chants. But he said, ‘This is an idol.’ So she told him, ‘Then replace it with a rock, smoothed by infinite waves. Repeat the chants to the rock, or, simply repeat your own name.’ Before leaving, he asked her, ‘Have you met Buddha?’ And she said: ‘When I met Buddha, I realized that Buddha was myself.’ Park told me, ‘I erase my thoughts one by one, to empty my mind.’ This is the essence of ‘Écriture’.

Even in his final years, after being diagnosed with lung cancer, he continued working. He no longer made large paintings – he was not sure he could finish them. Instead, he began making smaller works, on vintage newspapers from his and his wife’s birth years. His assistants found these old newspapers, and he created new ‘Écriture’ works on them. They became his final works, his last gesture before passing. In the end, Park believed the world was turning into a ‘hospital full of stressed people.’ So he made art to bring comfort, to slow things down.

This brings us back to Eco – and on to Instagram, where, 13 years ago, I started my handwriting project. I began during a holiday in Brittany with Etel Adnan, Simone Fattal, and Koo Jeong A. It was a stormy day, and we found refuge in a café. During our long conversation, Etel kept writing poems on a notepad. It was incredibly beautiful. Then it became clear to me: rather than lament the disappearance of handwriting, I could celebrate the written word. I could use technology to create a movement. I started posting photographs of handwritten notes written during my meetings with artists, each carrying a different message. The result is a compendium of handwritten notes in the digital age, shaped by the many individuals who have contributed to it: a celebration of handwriting.