PIGEONNET




Hidden Cartographies:
Circuits of
Mail Art in Mexico

Museo de la Filatelia
Oaxaca, MX

Curators:
Pedro Ceñal Murga
& Alfonso Fierro

Museographer:
Estudio Fi
Pigeonnet taps into the network of “rooftop flyers” in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and uses their pigeons’ honing ability to deliver hand-written messages between friendly rivals. 

Introduced by immigrants of Italian, Polish, and Irish descent, pigeon breeding in New York became quite popular.  By the 1940s and 1950s, pigeon lofts could be seen on countless rooftops of the Lower East Side.  Real-estate development and population shifts caused the practice to dwindle and segregated it to parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island, neighborhoods undergoing racial changes. This shift created an unlikely camaraderie between working-class rooftop flyers from diverse backgrounds.  This fellowship on ground turns into a fierce competition on air, when they send their respective flock to fly and mingle. Once in the air, pigeons have no owners, and the game of pigeon luring pigeons into rival territory begins.  


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Hidden Cartographies: Circuits of Mail Art in Mexico

During the 70s and 80s, Mail Art appeared as a network of aesthetic-political exchanges between artists from different parts of the world through the postal system. From archive material and contemporary reviews, Hidden Cartographies: Circuits of Mail Art in Mexico seeks to make visible the infrastructures that allowed the construction and registration of Mexican artists, collectives, and groups in this global network, as well as the aesthetic and political concerns that motivated it. The exhibition makes visible the participation in the Mail Art network from four curatorial nuclei that lead us from the appropriation of the postal system (envelopes, stamps, stamps) to the composition of the artistic communities that formed it (directories) as well as the consolidation of its ideology (manifestos, polls, debates) passing through the transmission of news, events, and updates through periodic bulletins, and the different forms of collaboration that developed in the collective activities of Mail Art. Meanwhile, a series of contemporary interventions suggests links between past and present, between Mail Art and current artistic concerns.


With documental material from:
Maris Bustamante, Ulises Carrión, Felipe Ehrenberg, Helen Escobedo, César Espinosa, Aarón Flores, Pedro Friedeberg, Jesús Romeo Galdámez, Lourdes Grobet, María Eugenia Guerra, Mauricio Guerrero, Alberto Híjar, Marcos Kurtycz, Magali Lara, Manuel Marín, Mónica Mayer, Leticia Ocharán, Santiago Rebolledo, Araceli Zúñiga

And commissioned pieces from:
Santiago Muédano, Federico Pérez Villoro, Edwina Portocarrero

Graphic Design:
Jackie Crespo