An airplane’s shadow crosses a checkerboard sky, its pattern evoking the strategy and luck which determine a refugee’s chance of escape. Two parakeets (highly social birds who mate for life) surround a yellow mailbox, spilling out with letters and birdseed. The letters are a fragment of the correspondence between Soleimani’s parents, during the period when her father had already fled Iran and her mother was still inside the country, looking for a way out. On one envelope, a careful observer can read an address in Turkey; to its left, a small figure stands outside their car, waving over the horizon line. Altogether, the layered elements in Correspondents draw an emotional geography, a distance bridged with ink, paper and hope.