Partners

Biographical Background

My experiences in Mail Art date from1967 when Edgardo Antonio Vigo,Guillermo Deisler,Dámaso Ogaz and me exchanged our respective publications :Diagonal Cero (Diagonal Zero),Ediciones Mimbre (Osier Editions),La Pata de Palo (leg of Wood) and Los Huevos del Plata (The Eggs of Silver).From these publications we later assembled the testimony of our propositions.I officially began creating Mail Art in 1969 when the Uruguayan magazine OVUM 10 published my postcards and visual poems.

In 1974,during the Uruguayan military dictatorship,I organized the First Latinoamerican Mail Art Exposition at Galeria U,in Montevideo,Uruguay.My edition of apocryphal mail art stamps denounced the dictatorial regime for its brutal suppresion of human rights and this eventually led to my incarceration from August,1977 to November,1979.But ,in October,1983 I resumed my artistic activities with the "1^st.of May" Exhibition at the Association of Banking Employees of Uruguay.Thereafter,I proposed and organized the Latin American and Caribbean Association of Mail Artists which was formed August 3l,1984,in Rosario,Argentina.Since then,I have participed in hundreds of Mail Art Shows throughout the world with combinations of my poetry,performances and video art.

Slowly,but surely internet asserts itself all over the world,being every day greater the number of connected people to the web of nets Latin America is not the exception,from Punta Arenas in Chile to Mexicali in Mexico, the entities electronically united in the infoway of superhighway are thousands and thousands,which through the cyberspecial waves reach the most far away corners of the world.

In homage to David Cole

by Clemente Padín

The Mail Art between the one which was and the one which will be. The iron law of the system in operation: first the symbolic activity of the towns creates the artistic movements in order to mark absences and imperfections in the social texture and, then, the system, once past the iconoclast rage of the first moments, return them to its service, by means of the institucionalization and transforming in mercha

by Clemente Padínndise that had been created in order to attack it, subjecting it to the laws of the market.

Meine ersten Erfahrungen mit mail art stammen ungefähr aus dem Jahr 1967, als Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Guillermo Deisler, Dámaso Ogaz und ich unsere jeweiligen Publikationen austauschten. Von diesen Publikationen ausgehend, montierten wir schließlich unsere künstlerischen Grundsätze. Offiziell begann ich mail art im Jahr 1969 zu machen , als das Magazin OVUM aus Uruguay meine Postkarten und visuellen Gedichte veröffentlichte.

an interview book from Dobrica Kamperelic,Beograd,Yugoslavia,1996

Mail Art by emphatizing communication,i.e.,the character of use -not of change- of the artistic product and networking,by enhancing the co-operative forms of creation and diffusion opposed to the ideology generated by the individual forms of production and against the cultural dictac of the official system of the Fine Arts and their coryphaeus,the critics and curators are both situated outside the habituals codes used as legitimazing screens of well known social structures.