Networking Regionalism: Long-Distance Performativity In The International Mail Art Network

Abstract

In the 1980s, the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife became a major hub for the international mail art network. If an occasionally defiant northeastern regionalism marks the production of Pernambucan writers, artists and intellectuals throughout the 20th century, how would this cultural stance meet with the accelerated internationalisation of communication systems that led to the formation of increasingly cross-national artistic networks? This essay explores how local concerns, registered through performance, urban interventions and works that foreground the everyday life of the city, intersected with bodies of matter —mail art works— that travelled on behalf of the artist, transferring their bodies or their localities into varied worldwide contexts. These parallel activities were elementally conjoined both as expressions of the local and immediate and as displacements of these experiences to other localities.