The First Elective Workshop on Mail Art took place in the winter of 1985. For two months, Eugenio Dittborn invited a group of Chilean artists to build a network of communication and collective artistic production based on sending and returning envelopes, instructions, drawings, and fragments that were exchanged among them, testing the materiality of the message and distance as a method.
Forty years after its creation, this exhibition presents the constellation of gestures and minimal fragments that shaped its circulation. What remains of this “minired,” as Dittborn called it, are the documents archived by one of the workshop participants, Nury González. On August 5 of that year, the workshop culminated with a final shipment from Carlos Montes de Oca to Eugenio Dittborn. The latter then wrote a closing text in seven points: here, the last of them.
We made a mini-network. There it is.
Here, now that you’ve read this, the network is working. It’s been worked on.
There it is. It’s worthless.
It’s worthless because it’s priceless.
Make it your treasure.
Mail art isn’t collected. It circulates and circulates, and it’s archived.
Make your own treasure. Your archive. Your address book,
Your archive of departure and arrival dates for your own and others’ mailings.
Take as long as you can to respond, or respond immediately.
Repeat yourself to the precise point. One millimeter more can be tiring.
Always read what you receive a second, third, fourth, and fifth time.
The fifth time will be when it has just arrived.
Definitely don’t send it.
Give doubt time.
Send it without doubt.
The first elective postal art workshop has concluded.
Keep in touch.
Dittborn.
