90.5cm wide x 126cm high

I found it on my travels—an original Blickensderfer typewriter, model. Serial numbers 147369 and 26645 which has been stamped onto the base. A combination of two models dating circa 1895-1905. It sat in a dusty corner of a secondhand shop, dignified despite its age, its metal still shining faintly, the last threads of ribbon barely holding on. It was, miraculously, still in working condition. All it needed was the ink ribbon to be wound—but even without it, I could feel the weight of the words it had once carried.

I couldn't stop thinking about the person that had once hovered over those keys. The pressure of fingers that hesitated before confessing. The clack of truth, the rhythm of arguments, the slow bleed of love letter after love letter.

And then the thought struck me—what if this machine had written its final letter in the throes of heartbreak? What if its last task was to shape a confession—one not of love, but of loss? What if that letter was never answered? What if that silence broke it?

In that letter, it wrote to its lover. Not just with words, but with weight. It pleaded. It remembered. It unraveled. It spoke of love that was given completely and never returned in kind. It told of how that love, once the very thing that made it feel alive, now haunted it like a ghost trapped between keystrokes. It didn't just break—it shattered.

And so I deconstructed the typewriter. Piece by piece. As if love had ripped it apart. As if each bolt and key were fragments of a heart that had typed its last hope into the void. At the center of the artwork, the last letter. Not for nostalgia, not for history—but for release. For grief. For the aching truth that some love stories don’t end with goodbye. They end with collapse.

This piece is about the intimacy between object and emotion, about how even steel and ink can hold heartbreak. It is a letter from a machine, written for a lover, in a language only the broken can truly understand.

“You Were the Death of Me”
By Renato Vitolo