Exhibition opening and talk with Francesco Martelli, Irina Zucca Alessandrelli, Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, Paulo Bruscky
Free admission
Sunday, November 24, 2024, 11 a.m.
Cittadella degli Archivi, Via Ferdinando Gregorovius 15, Milan
Political Attitude. Artists of Latin America from the Paulo Bruscky Archive.
Exhibition opening and talk with Francesco Martelli (Director of Cittadella degli Archivi and Documentary Manager and Digital Conservator of the City of Milan), Irina Zucca Alessandrelli (Curator of the Collezione Ramo and Milano Drawing Week), Jacopo Crivelli Visconti (Curator of the exhibition, Curator of the São Paulo Biennial 2020/2021, Director of the Albuquerque Foundation, Sintra, Portugal, and Curator of the Back to the Future section of Artissima 2024), and Paulo Bruscky, the artist exhibiting for the first time outside Brazil his archive of mail art made under the South American dictatorships of the 1970s.
Paulo Bruscky, born in Recife in 1949, has been assembling and maintaining since the 1960s an extraordinary archive of postal art, or works on paper by various artists sent by mail, thus escaping the various censorships of the years of dictatorship in South America. For decades Bruscky maintained correspondence with artists from Latin America and other countries such as Japan (with a large presence of affiliates of the Gutai group), the United States, with various members of Fluxus and Eastern Europe, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with various Italian artists, particularly in the area of Visual Poetry. The network of international relationships that Bruscky has managed to build over decades makes his archive, which contains more than 50,000 works, one of the most extensive in the world of mail art.
The exhibition curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti in June 2023 at the Istituto de Arte Contemporanea (IAC) in São Paulo comes to Italy for Milan Drawing Week at the Cittadella degli Archivi, one of the largest in Europe, which holds Milanese history from throughout the last century.
The curator selected works by Bruscky himself and other Latin American artists and collectives with whom the artist maintained an assiduous correspondence from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, when most Latin American countries were ruled by repressive regimes or military dictatorships (Carlos Zerpa, César Espinosa, Colectivo-3, Clemente Padín, Dámaso Ogaz, Diego Barboza, Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Graciela Gutiérrez Marx, Guillermo Deisler, Harácio Zabala, Jesús Romeo Galdámez Escobar, Juan Carlos Romero, No Grupo, Oscar Joge Caraballo, Pedro Juan Gutierrez, Rubén Torres Llorca). The exhibition is a unique opportunity to deepen our knowledge of an artistic production of political and social resistance of which not much is known in Europe and which, by its very nature, has remained hidden until now.