Here are three some details of an add&pass project that was started by Keith S. Chambers (USA). The other participants are Margaret Jeddry (Canada), Gerald Jatzek (Austria), Luís Filipe Gomes (Portugal) and Gabriele Müller (Austria).
Bild-Gedicht
Zwischen 3. und 16. August 2021 fand die erste Mail-Art-Ausstellung auf Naxos statt. Beim Resist Mail Art Festival auf der griechischen Insel konnte man nicht nur Bilder anschauen, man konnte bei Workshops auch selbst tätig werden. Abgerundet wurde das Ganze durch Konzerte mit Conteh Dauda, Laurel Kortinas, Thanassis Koutsonas und MC Yinka.
Gabriele und Gerald waren mit einer Kombination aus Aquarell und Gedicht vertreten, einem durchaus kritischen Text, motiviert von der Liebe zu Griechenland.
In monatelanger Vorbereitung hat Maria Chorianopoulou für das Gelingen der Veranstaltung gesorgt: Ευχαριστώ πολύ, Μαρία.
Alle Beiträge sind in Marias Blog zu finden.
Calligraphy from France
Richard Baudet from Marseille has been active as a mail artist for about 10 years. He sent this wonderful piece of calligraphy & more with stamps from the bureau philatelique. As he states, “this is mailart, not art by mail“
Merci bien!
No Headaches!
This is a very nice confirmation mail from CEPAG in Belgium. They are working on an exhibition with titled Words against system headaches / Words for new utopias.
Update 12/2021: The exhibition has been delayed until 2022.
A Great Envelope
Thank you, Sylvia Dubois, for your art and for the fantastic envelope and the photos!
Joint Efforts
On July 18, 2021 Gerald and Gabriele were invited for a concert & poetry reading to the Halme Hof in Rohrendorf. Gerald played a mix of his own songs and international tunes in different languages. Gabriele entertained with her stories about ordinary people — which sometimes tend to be the strangest folks you can imagine.
Chaos & More
Three item were sent to Jean-Philippe Giniot (Gilliot) in Belgium. He should have already received them.
The title of Gabriele’s watercolor painting that you see on this page is chaos.
Gerald added one of his pangolin postcards and a poem about a fantasy animal, surrounded by a drawing (or the other way round, who knows).
Music from Norway
Gunn Nordheim Morstøl sent a very nice letter and and a collage that includes a guitar player. A long time ago, I looked like this. I wish I still had hair that long and full …
Being Illegal
On Refugee Day we want to tell you a story in form of a song. On 27 August 2015 Austrian police discovered a truck along the A4 highway in Austria and found 71 deceased illegal migrants, including eight children. All persons had suffocated within hours of boarding. There were no survivors.
Years before, Gerald had written an adaption of Woody Guthrie’s song Deportees. It tells exactly the story of what happened in 2015.
The chorus roughly translates as:
“Goodbye, my friend, forget that you are human,
forget who you are, and forget what you know.
When you’re illegal, you have no right and no name.
All that we know is that you’re not from here.”
In Viennese dialect:
“Pfiat di mei Freind, und vagiss, doss d a Mensch bist,
vagiss, wo du wasst, und vagiss, wos du woarst.
Wonnst illegal bist, host ka Recht und kan Nomen.
Ois wos ma wass, is, du bist net von do.”
Mythological Creature
The Chimaera (Χίμαιρα) was an ancient Greek monster. According to mythology it consists of a lion with a goat’s head on its back and a tail in the form of a snake.
Similar creatures existed in the beliefs other civilizations as well, e.g. the Indus people and Ancient Egypt.
Over time the term chimera has come to describe any fictional creature that is a combination of various animals.
Examples are the manticore, a lion with a human head and a scorpion tail, and the griffin that is a combination of a lion and an eagle.
This chimaera is made of watercolors and ink, and flew across the Atlantic to visit fellow mail artist Moan Lisa.
An Eye for an Eye
Ojo por ojo, or: an eye for an eye was the theme of a mail call by the Spanish artist Felipe Lamadrid. The exhibition in Cádiz in the autonomous community Andalusia features more than 200 works, among them two colored pencil drawings by Gabriele Müller.
Music in Prison
Love, Freedom, Solidarity is the theme of an exhibition in Carrara. The town in northern Italy is known for its wonderful marble – and its revolutionary traditions since the 1890s. In 1968 Carrara saw the foundation of the International Federation of Anarchists (IFA).
Our contribution consists of Gabriele’s watercolor painting and Gerald’s poem about Greek prisoners that escape suppression and loneliness with the help of music and and an arghile (hookah). The text bears references to rembetiko, originally a genre of underground music, heavily influenced by Arabic/Turkish and Sephardic traditions. Rembetiko songs deal with (lost) love, drugs, lack of money, crime and an all-but-settled way of life.
Every authoritarian or dictatorial government in Greece since the 1930s tried to suppress the subculture. Music cafes were closed down and opened in other places. Instruments were smashed by police officers, and new ones were built. Musicians were incarcerated, and continued to make music inside the prisons.
A famous song about the prison of Yedi Koule (turkish: seven towers) in Thessaloniki starts with these lines:
Πέντε χρόνια δικασμένος
μέσα στο Γεντί Κουλέ. (2)
Από το πολύ σεκλέτι
το ‘ριξα στον αργιλε.
Five years convicted
in the prison of Yedi Koule. (2)
All the sadness
made me start (to smoke) the hookah.
Listen to the song in Greek and in Turkish by Glykeria & Dilec Koc
From Russia With Stamps
Russia may as well be a synonym for poetry: Pushkin, Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Blok… Not all of them fall into the category great Russian soul. Vladimir Maykovsky, for instance, says in his epitaph for Sergei Esenin who commited suicide in the hotel Angleterre, writing his last poem with his own blood:
“…maybe, if there had been ink in the Angleterre,
there’d have been no reason for veins to be cut.”
In quite a few poems you can find an attitude that the American writer Christopher Moore describes with the words:
“Scratch a cynic and you will find a disappointed romantic.”
The well known mail artist Ilya Semenko-Basin is also more on the sarkastic side when he writes poetry about a time when the biznesmeni (businessmen) of today were tovarishchi (comrades). Fittingly, his works were accompanied by stamps from the USSR.
An example of his writing is only a mouse click away.
Friendly Feedback
The folks behind the “Send me Your Light” call didn’t just acknowledge our contribution. Anna Krieps sent us a thank-you note in the form of a photo collage about (her?) cosmic dreams.
The stamp number indicates that this is her 567th mail art piece in 2021. Now, that’s what you call industrious! A big hand for Anna!
Looking Back
The literary association Podium was founded 50 years ago. The anniversary issue of its magazine is devoted to the seventies. Editor Barbara Neuwirth selected contributions from Hilde Berger Sonja Bulker, Manfred Chobot, Anna Felnhofer, Harald Friedl, Gerald Jatzek, Rudolf Kraus, Gabriele Müller. Luis Stabauer, Hannes Vyoral, Peter Paul Wipplinger and others.
The Podium online store offers back issues of the magazine, anthologies and more than 100 volumes of their Portrait Series with poetry from Austrian.
Die Literaturvereinigung Podium wurde vor 50 Jahren gegründet. Die Jubiläumsausgabe der Zeitschrift ist den 70er-Jahren gewidmet. Herausgeberin Barbara Neuwirth hat dafür Beiträge von Hilde Berger Sonja Bulker, Manfred Chobot, Anna Felnhofer, Harald Friedl, Gerald Jatzek, Rudolf Kraus, Gabriele Müller. Luis Stabauer, Hannes Vyoral, Peter Paul Wipplinger und anderen ausgewählt.
Im Podium Webshop sind sowohl die Ausgaben der Zeitschrift wie Anthologien und die mehr als 100 Lyrikbände der Reihe Podium Porträt erhältlich.
Send in the Dolphins
Send me your light will be the title of an exhibition in Berlin’s Kunstraum Reuter in autumn 2021. The contribution of Gabriele and Gerald is a combination of watercolor & text in the form of a haiku.
The work takes the point of sea creatures that are able to dive into the lightless depths of the oceans. When they return, they swim towards a bluish light. But the surface doesn’t necessarily stand for hope, but rather the opposite, nowadays.
The distinctly provisional, sketchy approach corresponds to the content: We hope that humanity will be able to stop climate change. If not, another, more intelligent species may take over.
Why not the dolphins?
Stamps from the States
We received a couple of his stamps from Thomas Brown. We especially like this one. It has a touch of DADA to it, don’t you think so.
Schubert’s Colors
Coming back to Vienna I found this drawing by Luís Filipe Gomes from Portugal who loves to listen to the music of Franz Schubert. You can see the colors of the Eb major Trio which was first performed in Schubert’s concert in the hall of the Vienna Musikverein on 26 March 1828.
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