The Transversal Network: Mail Art Practices and International Contacts in Atelier 35, Oradea, and the MAMŰ group, Târgu-Mureș, in the early 1980s
The Transversal Network: Mail Art Practices and International Contacts in Atelier 35, Oradea, and the MAMŰ group, Târgu-Mureș, in the early 1980s

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses the mail art practices in Romania in the early 1980s, focusing on two artistic groups – Atelier 35 from Oradea and MAMŰ group from Tîrgu-Mureș – and on the contacts and collaborations they established with the wide international and/or regional mail art networks – especially through the artist Ioan Bunuș. Comparing and discussing bibliographical and archival documentations, with visual mail art artefacts and oral history testimonies, the article argues that the local mail art practice was strongly shaped by specific local and regional characteristics – such as a rather “isolationist” tendency, than an eagerness to connect and communicate throughout the “unknown” world, or the prerequisite of direct contacts among artists, of pre-existent networks of collaboration that should have informed future mail art exchanges. As such, the local mail art practices seem to describe “transversal movements of cultures” (Lionnet, Shih, 2005), processes of hybridisation which, though not fully separated from the “major”, were actively generating a non-Western idiom of mail art that was to a large extent effective in diversifying and consolidating the artists’ interest in non-conventional languages.

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