Pelos nossos desaparecidos [For Our Missing People]

Paulo Bruscky was one of the foremost pioneers of Mail Art in Brazil. Mail Art is a form of expression in which artists hijack the postal service itself as a readymade artistic medium, adopting the post as an international communication network to be manipulated for creative ends. Bruscky had a militant stance towards this practice during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985). As he wrote in 1976, “In Mail Art, art has reclaimed its principal functions: information, protest, and denunciation.”

 

Whether playful or political in tone, Mail Art served Bruscky as a means of escaping censorship under a repressive dictatorial regime, as well as a potent tool for building a community of collaborators far from his small city of Recife. For his Ao remetente series, he sent letters to people around the world at erroneous addresses; undeliverable, they were eventually returned to him. The artist combined the diverse postal markings they accumulated on their circular journeys through the postal network into a collage that he photocopied and then sent as another mail artwork. Bruscky’s impulse to probe the postal system’s bureaucratic machinations is a constant feature of his transgressive artistic practice.