Videopost (1977): a Transnational Video Art Project Organised Through the Solidarity of Mail-Art Networks

Description

In 1977, Colombian artist Jonier Marin organised Videopost, a collective video project, at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP). This institution had recently acquired its video equipment, and Marin took advantage of it, with the help of the museum staff, to record short 5-minute fragments according to the instructions received from artists from different locations.

The project was developed through postal contacts, using the connective and activist methodologies of mail-art: horizontality, interdisciplinarity, contextuality, spontaneity, connectivity, poor materiality, connection art-life, politicisation. Participants included Marin himself, the Venezuelan Itamar Martínez, the French Jean Kuhl, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Alain Snyers and Grupo UNTEL, the Uruguayans Óscar Caraballo and Clemente Padín, the Italians Antonio Ferro and Romano Pelli, the Japanese Mukata Takamura, the Argentinean Edgardo Antonio Vigo, the Belgian Eduard Bal, the German Klaus Groh, the Palestinian, resident in France, Rachid Koraichi, and the Polish Pawel Petasz.

The proposals were very varied, including visual and sound poetry, critiques of the media – especially television –, actions in the public space, and experiences with the specificities of the videographic medium. But in all of them, the same left-wing, libertarian political sensibility could be appreciated. Over the long distances that separated the participants' places of origin, the ideologisation of artistic production took the form of an international solidarity, expressed through the possibilities offered by communication networks and audiovisual technologies.

This presentation introduces the Videopost project, focusing on some of the most relevant proposals. The aim is to highlight how the poor media that had circulated internationally through envelopes and mailings was now being introduced into the electronic audiovisual sphere. However, with this transfer, the artworks did not lose their activist and propositional characteristics, which served as a link for a critique of the oppressive conditions shared by disparate regions such as Latin America or Eastern Europe. But these conditions of oppression were also felt by agents in wealthy countries such as France or Germany who were aware of the imbalances of power in different parts of the world, and understood them to be linked to the hegemony of the North and the West.

Period	17 Mar 2023 → 18 Mar 2023
Event title	The Second East-Central European Art Forum: Equal and Poor: A comparative perspective on Art in Communist Europe and the Global South in the long 1970s
Event type	Conference
Location	Poznan, PolandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International