Transgresoras: Mail Art and Messages

This session focuses on Latinx and Latin American women-identifying artists who use the postal system to transgress a varied set of restrictions, ranging from gender expectations to authoritarian regimes and censorship. As a mode of artistic production that relies on the postal service for the circulation and exchange of artworks, a practice that reached its height in Latin America during the 1970s and 80s, mail art allowed artists in repressive societies to evade strict censorship measures and provided a platform for circulating their work and for political protest. While the male artists in the international Mail Art network are increasingly well-documented, the roles of women artists in this forum are often absent from existing accounts. This session therefore aims to explore the complexities and stakes of gender in mail art communiqués as well as other ways in which women artists constructed and critique mediated messages and systems of circulation and communication. For this session, we are looking for papers that address a broad range of topics related not only to Mail Art but the ways in which it influenced and is in dialogue with contemporary art. Of particular interest are artists who communicate messages through alternative networks of exchange.Topics to be explored may include artworks that engage: censorship and state control of communications media; authoritarian violence; gender constructions, feminisms and maternity; interconnectedness and community at a distance; art world and state bureaucracies; migration and family separation; the formation of queer communities; and decolonial ecological strategies.