This document serves to illustrate the scope of avant-garde expression, especially as relating to visual poetics, disseminated throughout distant regions of Brazil. Owing to reproductions in graphic media, it has been possible to create regional centers whose uniqueness [in terms of expression] is not compromised by communication with—as opposed to dependence on—the major metropolises of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In this respect, Mail art is a means of communication but is also mostly the source of a new Latin American art from remote regions of the continent.
Under the auspices of the Museu de Arte e Cultura Popular (MACP), the Cinco e Meia project was held at the Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso [do Norte] in the capital of the state of Cuiabá from June 15 to June 30, 1984. The Boletim Diário, coordinated by Wladepino (Wlademir Dias Pino) and Clóvis (Clóvis Irigaray), was a visual document with images taken from films, graphic poems with key words, and other illustrations. In 1973, art critic Aline Figueiredo and artist Humberto Espíndola created the MACP-UFMG, which they directed until 1982.
Poet, visual artist, and graphic designer, Wlademir Dias Pino (b. 1927) created a variation of Concrete poetry known as the “process poem” whose advocates included politician and art administrator Mário Chamie. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Dias Pino’s career began in the forties. He participated in the Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta held in 1956, and in the IX and XIV São Paulo Biennials in 1967 and 1977. He was a professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) from 1973 to 1978, and from 1978 to 1993, at the Universidad Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), where he worked on the Mail art project.
Clóvis Irigaray—along with Adir Sodré and Gervane de Paula—formed part of a group of artists that emerged in Mato Grosso in the seventies.
In Pernambuco, another region removed from the centers of art in Brazil, Paulo Bruscky developed similar ideas in his approach to the national and international history of Mail art in “Arte correio e a grande rede: hoje, a arte é este comunicado” [doc. no. 1110683].