Rachel Kamata

Mail to the Afterlife

2025

Acrylic on Fiberglass

~6’ x 4' x 4'

Organized by Day of the Dead, San Antonio, TX

The San Antonio Calavera Collection is an annual public art initiative that celebrates the city’s rich Día de los Muertos traditions through contemporary artistic interpretation. Each year, local artists are selected to transform larger than life fiberglass calavera (carefully made in Mexico). Displayed throughout downtown during San Antonio’s Día de los Muertos festivities, the collection is now comprised of over 40 skulls. I was honored to participate as a selected artist in 2025 with "Mail to the Afterlife." Thank you Rubio and Chef Johnny Hernandez for making this possible! 

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Memory, despite our best efforts, is subject to decay. Mail to the Afterlife reflects on how societies forget—how repetition replaces reflection as attention spans shorten and our capacity for long-term thinking erodes. The sculpture, a painted fiberglass skull, uses mail as a metaphor
for collective memory. In the United States, the deliberate exchange of personal letters is in sharp decline, and USPS locations are being consolidated (to the detriment of many Americans living in rural areas).

 

Letters enter through the skull’s nose and eyes, reappearing at the back. Swirls of mail move through a cavern of stacked shipping boxes. Within this system, repair and daily operation require destruction. Mail must be shredded in the “Lethe,” the mythic river of forgetting. New mail, new memories, arrive each day. Yet the destruction of memory prevents growth, leaving the system suspended in a strange limbo.