In Transit

Eugenio Dittborn invented airmail paintings in 1983 in Santiago, Chile, after more than a decade of experimentation on various supports with extra-pictorial techniques with which he sought to challenge traditional easel painting while avoiding political censorship in his country. Airmail paintings are a hybrid between letter and painting. They have an epistolary and a pictorial body. They were designed to be able to be folded, put into an envelope, and travel through the international airmail network. They go from one place to another on the planet in a coming and going in which the origin and destination are constantly moving.

In Transit project invites centres to participate in the creation of an airmail painting, where those involved will work – based on materials and trigger instructions provided by the Museum – on the concept of displacement. This concept is not only present in the work of Eugenio Dittborn but it challenges us all and we can approach it in different ways. At the end of the project, an exhibition of results will be held at Es Baluard Museu with all the creations of the participating centres. In this way we will achieve a multiple and plural cartography of the concept based on the diversity of views and approaches of the groups that have taken part in the project.

The project has collaborated with Tonina Matamalas, Blu, and Aldana Areco, who were responsible for the design and production of materials that participating centers will receive, and which act as triggers for reflection on the concept of displacement.

Voluntarily and freely, the centres involved will be able to come and see the exhibition by the artist “Eugenio Dittborn. Airmail Paintings”, although the project does not imply the need to travel to the Museum in person because it is a remote artistic practice project.

The exhibition of the results can be visited between June 5 and 15 at the Guillem Cifre de Colonya Educational Space of Es Baluard Museum.

 

Tonina Matamalas, @toxina_, is a queer visual artist and andritxola currently based in Berlin. She works with documentary drawing, live drawing, illustration and moving images. She uses drawing as a tool to support the creation of collaborative narratives and political works. He produces fanzines, illustrations, experimental television, films and animations in search of fissures for survival in the current chaos and imagining possible futures.

‘Representations are not neutral, that’s why I draw’.

Blu, illustrator, tattooist and engraver born in La Plata in 1990. He studied a degree in art at the UNLP with a specialisation in engraving and printed art. He is currently part of Tallers 16, a graphic arts space in Pere Garau where he works his magic and gives training workshops in screen printing and engraving.

Aldana Areco, born in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 1980 and resident in Spain since 2000, has a degree in Hispanic philology and a Master’s degree in Modern Languages and Literatures (UIB). She also studied a postgraduate degree in Intercultural Communication at SISU Shanghai University. Since 2014 she has been teaching Spanish as a foreign language, currently teaching at Ascenso (Estudi General Lul·lià. Palma).

In 2023 she starts the project of ‘own bookshop’. A bookshop specialising in books written by women and dissidents. The bookshop has become a space for dialogue, reflection and literary creation.