Twenty-Four Letters is an epistolary response to three moving-image works by Esmé Haddrill Selman: the blinking at the start of the day (2025), From the Great White Sky (2026) and Ordinary Ruptures (2026). Esmé’s work uses a combination of Super 8, 16mm, archive/found footage and text to explore themes of intimacy and closeness. These films often contain footage of our shared friends.

You saved a blank roll of Super8 for us to use together. I am finally getting my shot. Next stop, Hollywood! I don’t think our film will be finished in time. See, we’re all ideas right now. We are thinking about how a film can be a correspondence between two people—in real time, in past time. You told me to read KS. I did. She says, everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects, impacts suffered or barely avoided. It takes everything we have […] we wish for the simple life that winks at us from someone else’s beautiful flowerbeds. We live a similar life, we are glancing through each other’s flowerbeds, attuning to each other’s way of seeing things. I will shoot: cracking my window open in the morning to let the breeze in, wiping the stove before you are awake, S under the sheets when I leave for work, a conversation with friends about ideas (always ideas), drawing a diagram of how it will all come together, the train as it pulls in and I can step off directly in front of the footpath leading to our house. We dream of getting by, getting on track. We dream of moving on, moving through. You will shoot: something through a window, the light dancing on the bathtub, something poetic, the back of a lover, the hands of a friend, something which will remind me why we have come to know each other. It will be better than mine. But that will make me happy. She says, and the charged particularity of objects, images, and events encountered framed the importance of making implicit things matter. Another says, does it matter? I say, yes, I think this might matter. You say, show me what you’ve been working on.