Paper Waves
A monthly letter about ordinary things, photographs, and the quiet practice of paying attention.
Returning to what I have loved doing since I was a child has become a way of taking care of myself. From here, I continue a process that brings me closer to who I am in a more authentic way.
One of the things I love about my current therapist is the way she explains things through images. Today she said: “It’s like having all your clothes from the wardrobe piled up into a messy mountain, and slowly putting them back in order, one by one.” It couldn’t have been a more accurate image. For me, putting things in order has always been a mental gesture before anything else.
Sending letters, digital or physical, even this one, is also part of this process. A way of slowly bringing things back into place. Writing is one of them, something I had set aside and am now bringing back into view.
I’ve been writing letters since I learned how to write. To my friends, sometimes to people I couldn’t speak to directly, and to strangers. Over time I stopped, then I started reading epistolary books, and the way intimacy takes shape across pages, and how someone becomes more human through writing, has always fascinated me.
I think I’ve come to appreciate certain authors even more through their letters and private writings, Pavese, Pessoa, Frida Kahlo, Picasso, Wittgenstein. Not only through their work, but through the way they tell themselves, and this doesn’t take anything away from their work, but makes them feel closer to me. It also doesn’t feel like a coincidence that one of the projects I always return to is Letters of Note, and that writing letters to my future self over the past years has, in some way, brought me here.
Letters slow things down. They ask for attention and presence. I love the gesture itself. I think of it as a ritual, almost something sacred. A way of taking care of thought itself. And there is something that cannot be avoided: presence. It cannot be delegated, automated, or outsourced, because in a letter you place a fragment of a life. Not a perfect version, but something fragile and unique: someone writing what surrounds them, what passes through them, and then trying to offer it to someone else, who is also inside their own chaos.
Paper Waves comes from the way writing helps me bring things into order, from the desire to collect fragments of my life and let them go, let them travel, and reach people who might feel a little less alone. It is also a way for me to feel less alone, to let out what I carry inside when it feels like too much, and to give it a space where it can be held.
I know this practice exists everywhere, but in Italy it still hasn’t fully found its space. This is also why I write in English, to meet it where it already feels more alive, more shared, more natural.
Paper Waves is, in essence, my way of bringing letters back into circulation. Not as nostalgia, but as presence. Not as something of the past, but as something that still continues to be necessary.
How it works
Once a month, I choose a photograph, print it, sign it, and send it, both physically and digitally. Some are real photographs, taken in the places that form my everyday life: a table, a coastline, a city at the wrong hour. Others are created with AI, creatures and places that have never existed. The first wave belongs to this second category: mermaids were never real, and perhaps this is also a way of letting them go. July is also my birth month, and it could only be represented by something that has always felt close to me.
The project begins on July 20th. I won’t say more here: I don’t want to describe a photograph before it has been held in someone’s hands.
There are two ways to take part:
Pixels — €3/month
A digital club with a monthly photograph and written thoughts, plus access to the archive.
Paper — €9/month
A physical print (10×15, signed) and a handwritten letter delivered to your mailbox.
No commitment: stay as long as it feels right, leave when it stops making sense.
On the 20th, I’ll be at the mailbox.
I hope something of mine finds its way to yours.
Yours,
Stefania