POSTAL POETRY

International Mail Art Postcards Exhibition at Gallery HOTEL DADA, Junín, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Works from the Hotel Dada Archive, June 14 – July 25, 2025
Curatorship by Silvio De Gracia
Exhibition Design: Ana Montenegro

Distance communication and small-format subversion

Mail art is a form of distance communication.  Historically, it has focused on exploring the different modes of communication within the postal system. Thus, one of its fundamental practices has been the redirection and reinterpretation of products originating from postal institutions, such as envelopes, postmarks, stamps, postcards and parcels. The appropriation and modification of these materials involves interventions and artistic strategies that subvert utilitarian and conventional values. These strategies give rise to manifestations that question and expand the formats of the postal institution. Examples include intervened or decorated envelopes, counter-bureaucratic rubber stamps, apocryphal stamps and creative postcards.

The postcard format is one of the most representative and enduring in the repertoire of mail artists. Through countless creative approaches, the postcard has proven to be an unparalleled medium for circulating messages and aesthetic productions.  In historical tracing, it is possible to affirm that the appropriation of the postcard as an artistic medium begins with a series of four postcards that Marcel Duchamp sent in 1916 to the Arensbergs, his neighbors and benefactors, including an explanatory text, more or less coded, on the Large Glass. Similarly, artists of Italian Futurism, such as Balla and Pannaggi, also played a pioneering role in the use of the postcard form as an expressive medium.^[1] In both cases, the postcard shifts from its utilitarian function to the transmission of aesthetic information. This shift is a notable precursor to the operations that would later be consolidated within the mail art movement.

Creative postcards are produced using a variety of techniques. They range from postcards decorated with plastic procedures, such as painting, collages, drawings, or texts, to professionally printed postcards altered at a visual and conceptual level through a series of interventions on pre-existing postcards. In some cases, no transformation occurs; the postcards are merely used as support for small-format artworks.

 Postcards have also been used to create conceptual works that would otherwise have no material existence outside the postal system. In these processes, the support itself and the interventions of the postal institution affecting it are valued and exploited to enhance the meanings put into circulation. One notable example is the artist On Kawara and his renowned series of postcards and telegrams documenting his daily activities, including “I Got Up” and “I Am Still Alive.”^[2] Another prominent example is artist Douglas Huebler, whose works could not have been created without mail. Likewise, the postcards of phrases by the German artist Jürgen O. Olbrich, included in this exhibition, are part of this trend.

 The history of the “artist’s postcard” in Latin America began with the Creative Postcard Festival exhibition, which was presented in 1974 at the U Gallery in Montevideo under the coordination of mail artist and experimental poet Clemente Padín. In the 1970s, the creative postcard acquired a marked political bias in Latin America, functioning as an invaluable subversive device to disseminate information and encrypted messages that revealed the political and cultural repression experienced in countries under dictatorial regimes. In these contexts, postcards served two purposes: they circulated aesthetic forms outside of traditional channels and distributed critical information via postal systems. Edgardo Antonio Vigo’s series of postcards, “Set Free Palomo ” is one of the high points in the use of creative postcards as a political tool of denunciation and resistance. Vigo distributed the postcards as part of an international campaign to demand the freedom of one of his sons who was kidnapped by the civil-military-ecclesiastical dictatorship in Argentina.

The group of works presented in Postal Poetry, which brings together more than 70 artists from 22 countries, comes from the Hotel Dada Archive. The collection features historical and contemporary artists who demonstrate the various approaches to creative postcards. The exhibition includes decorated and altered postcards, historical pieces related to the Latin American political context by artists such as Clemente Padín, Paulo Bruscky, and Guillermo Deisler, as well as handmade and commercially printed works, cards with visual poetry, and conceptual, anti-advertising, and performative proposals. What defines the transcendence of these “artist’s postcards,” however, is not their materiality or formal novelty, but their value as a form of communication. By dispersing alternative discourses and messages, these postcards operate from a position of operational and conceptual marginality, resignifying themselves as means of subversion in a small format.

Silvio De Gracia, June 13, 2025.

POSTAL POETRY – International Mail Art Postcard Exhibition

Works from the Hotel Dada Archive

Participants: GERMANY Hans Braumueller, Thorsten Fuhrmann, Annegret Heinl, Andrew Maximilian Niss, Jürgen O. Olbrich, Sabine Remy, Lars Schumacher, Susanne Schumacher, Sigismund Urban ARGENTINA María Castillo, Silvio De Gracia, Rubén Liggera, Marcela Peral AUSTRALIA Field Study-David Dellafiora BELGIUM Luc Fierens, Thierry Tillier BRAZIL Paulo Bruscky, Renata Danicek, Roberto Keppler, Ana Montenegro, Hugo Pontes, Marcia Rosenberger CHILE Antonio Cares, Guillermo Deisler SPAIN J. M. Calleja, Corporación Semiótica Galega, Ferran Destemple, Antonio Moreno Garrido, Miguel Jiménez-El Taller de Zenón, César Reglero FRANCE Albatroz, Julien Blaine, Christian Burgaud, Michel Della Vedova, André Robér GREECE Démosthéne Agrafiotis  IRELAND Amanda Coogan ITALY Franco Ballabeni, Vittore Baroni, Carla Bertola, Anna Boschi, Claudio Grandinetti, Gruppo Sinestetico, Leona K, Oronzo Liuzzi, Serse Luigetti, Ruggero Maggi, Simone Mazzoleni, Emilio Morandi, Cristiano Pallara, Renata Petti, Laura Pintus, Roberta Terzani, Alberto Vitacchio  JAPAN Keiichi Nakamura NORWAY Torill Elisabeth Larsen POLAND Andrzej Dudek-Durer PORTUGAL Fernando Aguiar UNITED KINGDOM  Ptrzia Tictac RUSSIA Dmitry Babenko SERBIA Dobrica Kamperelic SWITZERLAND Ana Paula Barros, Heini Gut, Vänci Stirnemann UKRAINE Lubomyr Tymkiv URUGUAY Clemente Padín USA Picasso Gaglione, John Held Jr., Ray Johnson-Colección William S. Wilson, The Sticker Dude VIETNAM La Toan Vinh

HOTEL DADA

HOTEL DADA is a gallery specializing in mail art and experimental poetry located in Junín, in the northwest of the province of Buenos Aires. Founded in January 2020 by artists Silvio De Gracia and Ana Montenegro, the gallery originated from the homonymous magazine, which was published from 2002 to 2022.

Adopting a historical and contemporary approach, the gallery aims to showcase a series of artists associated with various genres of mail art and the exploration of poetic language and its many possibilities. In line with this curatorial vision, HOTEL DADA is dedicated to disseminating, exhibiting, and producing theory around expressions deemed marginal. HOTEL DADA understands marginality as an aesthetic-political category. The intention is to contribute to the recognition and positioning of alternative manifestations, such as artists’ stamps, assembled magazines, rubber stamps, poem objects, artists’ books, sticker art, artistic posters, visual poetry, videopoems, action poetry, phonetic poetry, sound poetry, collages, and photocopy art, among many other proposals that expand the limits of visual art.

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[1]              Giacomo Balla circulated his original scores on postcards. Meanwhile, Ivo Pannaggi stood out for his remarkably materic “postcard collages.”

[2]              In “I Got Up,” On Kawara sent postcards bearing the phrase “I Got Up” every day. In “I Am Still Alive,” he sent telegrams confirming his survival. Through these mail-based works, the artist reflects on communication, existence, and the nature of temporal experience.