In Care Of: Cord, Arkansas

In Care Of: Cord, Arkansas is an ongoing, living archive centered on queer life in the rural Arkansas Ozarks. The project gathers letters from queer individuals through a localized, consent-based process. Invitations to participate are left only at homes and businesses displaying pride flags—sites where queerness has already chosen visibility within a landscape, where such visibility is never neutral. Letters arrive by mail to a post office box in Cord, Arkansas, often anonymously, and frequently through informal networks of friends, acquaintances, and chosen kin.

Each letter, whether handwritten or typed, is carefully re-typed by the artist on a manual typewriter. This act of transcription functions as custodial labor rather than authorship, preserving content while removing handwriting as a form of biometric exposure. The resulting documents are framed and exhibited as a growing archive, emphasizing care, delay, and attention over immediacy or extraction.

Rather than presenting testimony as evidence or spectacle, In Care Of: Cord, Arkansas foregrounds relational knowledge—what can be shared, what must remain partial, and what it means to be received. The project understands rural queer experience not as singular or static, but as an ongoing negotiation with place, risk, memory, and survival.

In care of (c/o): A postal designation used when mail is sent to someone who will receive, hold, and responsibly pass it along, without claiming full ownership.