Artists’ postcards (actively produced from the 1960s onwards) have been mainly concealed and overlooked in contemporary art history. This artistic knowledge is social knowledge, with the postcard being an experimental art form and, like letter-writing, serving as a means of making connections.

For this assignment, a series of steps involves the production of mail artworks and a walking research method combined with the notion of facilitating, making public, and learning by doing. Together these pedagogical elements form a dialogical, performative process in which the emancipation of the not-knowing plays a vital role, stimulating peer-to-peer exchange within group dynamics.

With all its limitations, the digital classroom remains a location of possibility. By engaging in walking, archiving, and allowing conversations and experiences to linger long after leaving our ‘break-out rooms,’ we continue to value, observe and share our findings, collecting and actively creating traces to be shared and re-used. We foster an open classroom that allows multiple viewpoints to come together, allowing our learning not to be limited to results/solutions/right or wrong. We explore our continuously changing roles as learners, talkers, listeners, senders, and receivers in an increasingly interconnected and complicated world. This exchange is about creating space for critical awareness through dialogue.

• A1: First meeting: part 1 (2 hours)
  • Start with an introduction on the subject of mail art. Get to know the wide variety of examples and histories of mail art using some examples from the reference list.
  • Divide students into pairs. Then, during a one-hour conversation, invite them into a dialogue with one another on their terms. This conversation can happen in a break-out room (in Zoom or Teams) or face-to-face, as the situation allows. This exchange gives the student pairs time to share a conversation which they will eventually translate into a mail artwork.
  • Ask each student to make a postcard for their peer. They can make this artwork out of commonplace material and in the format of a postcard that prompts handling, asking to be picked up, turned over, shown to friends, and included in their lives. The only artistic restriction is that it fits through a letter box.
  • Working within this framework, we actively question what it is you give back, with an attitude of radical openness to the other. Exercise how to be part of a conversation and represent something (words, time spent). What are its contours? How does it feel? How can you share how you make sense of an act that seems familiar? In a postal piece in which care and tenderness are equally crucial to craftsmanship and artist persona.

• A2: First meeting – part 2 (1 hour meeting + self-directed work)
  • Begin with a one-hour conversation about artistic practices involving walking and introduction to the notion of the Dérive.
  • Some notes on walking: To walk does not just mean getting from point A to point B in a straight line. One can also walk for the sake of walking, where to walk is a method in itself. In the act of walking, you can allow yourself to dérive (to drift): to set aside a concrete time of the day to drop all other activities to go and explore your environment with deep attention and openness to the unexpected. We are moving onwards with the physical work in hand from our digital spaces, knowing that digital bodies are not entirely disconnected projections of our actual bodies and making the needed transition into an outside world and our direct surroundings. In this hybrid learning experience, the body becomes a tool for material sense-making and observing.
  • Each student will now mail the postcard they made to their peer. To do this, each student will need to find the nearest post office or mailbox and devise a map and method for getting there. Finally, find a way to record and document the walk.
  • If for whichever reason, walking is not possible, the participant can decide to hand over their walking instructions to another person.

• A3: Second meeting  (1 hour meeting + self-directed work) 
  • After a few days, we meet again (either in person or online, as the situation allows) to discuss, look at, and share our experiences with sending and receiving the postcard and walking.
  • After this conversation, we introduce the students to the online platform. This platform is where participants generously share experiences from assignments A1 and A2 and co-create an (online) archive. Students can add any documentation – journaling, objects, material explorations, text, drawings, music, transcriptions of conversations, videos, scans, photographic documentation, sound recordings, etc. All contributions are welcome, and the open archive makes it easy for students to view each other’s experiences and ways of working on the assignments. Then, use the entire day to upload the content.

• A4: Third meeting (3 hours)
  • In this meeting, we invite students to re-work the mail artwork each received in the mail from their peer. This time, they will also work with the collective archive. Students will form groups of four. Within these groups, they will meet each other. Together they will brainstorm how to translate an intimate, person-to-person exchange between peers into a work they could share with a broader audience.
  • Depending on how the group can meet (digital/physical/hybrid), specific forms of communication and reading will emerge from these sessions. For example, the group might be inspired to walk together. Or to have a conversation through a medium of choice. The aim is to co-create together in a group how to conduct a conversation, how messages travel and how collaboration takes time.
  • Students will now rework the mail artwork they received by post and send the revised version to the three other group members.

• Many inspiring examples of mail art include Ray Johnson, On Kawara, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper, Jenny Holzer, Dear Data PROJECT, Queer Correspondence, and Zoe Leonard. Artists connected with the Fluxus movement often used mail art as part of their artistic practice. In the 1960s and 1970s, the postcard embodied the movement’s engagement with experimental art forms and expressed disenchantment with the elitism of the art world.
• Book references: Artists’ Postcards: A Compendium (2012) and The world exists to be put on a postcard, Artists’ postcards from 1960 to now (2019) both by Jeremy Cooper.
• Find out about your (local) limitations for sending a postcard. For example, the NL standard is a minimum size is 14 x 9 cm with a maximum of A4 (C4 envelope: 22,9 x 32,4 cm) and a weight max of 350 g to use one stamp of € 0,96.
• Inspiring walking practices include the work of Stanley Brouwn (This Way Brouwn) and using the digital Dérive app (2013). (The notion of Dérive was developed by the Situationist International, an organization of artists, intellectuals, and political theorists who experimented with conceptual forms of critique on capitalist society).

Artist and educator Marijke Appelman developed this assignment for students in the Social Practices study program at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. The first-year Bachelor course, co-created with colleagues Karlijn Souren and Michelle Teran, was based on Solivitur ambulando (to solve by walking) to refer to a problem that is ’solved’ by a practical experiment. I (Marijke) started exploring by sending mail art around my graduation from my BA in Fine Art in 2008. For this text, I used quotes from our collective archive and briefings for our course at Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam, and my research project, “A Pedagogy-in-Process: The Artist-Teacher in the Feminist Classroom (2020)”, which can be found here: http://meia.pzwart.nl or here: https://graduation.projects.wdka.nl/2020-marijke-appelman/projects/a-pedagogy-in-process-the-artist-teacher-in-the-feminist-classroom.

Author’s Encouragement
Both feminist and social practice pedagogy is embodied and sensuous work. Materiality activates thoughts just as much as the other way around (thoughts activate materiality). Using our hands while talking, we simultaneously self-express and create recordings that carry signals of the crucial but often overlooked importance of the relationships we form, both around and as part of our making processes. In all these exchanges, the students’ perspectives (sender and receiver) are considered unique, valuable, and included in knowledge co-creation. For social practitioners, cultural work is rooted in social landscapes to which one should actively listen and respond.

Like all education, the art school exercises we participate in should liberate people, promote care, concern, and, most of all, connection, not only with each other but with communities, more-than-human bodies, land, and resources. We turn teaching into making activities to build a praxis that acknowledges and values contributions, lives, and histories. We aim to create an emancipatory learning experience for students in a (feminist) classroom as community and cooperation. Working with the notion of ‘self-archiving,’ we open up to each other and learn with and from each other’s experiences, practicing reflective accountability, and exploring how to possibly speak for others while bringing your perspectives to the material.

Additional Tools

• Zoom
• Dérive, https://deriveapp.com
• Randonautica, https://www.randonautica.com
• Hotglue, https://hotglue.me
• A series of online meetings (computer, Internet, Zoom), commonplace materials, a postal address (letter box & stamps), optional: apps on mobile phones (Dérive, 2013 and Randonautica, 2020), (Google) maps, and an online archive (Hotglue or another platform).