Letters against dying: mail art, aids, and working-through

Abstract

This article interprets mail art on aids as an aesthetic practice of collective elaboration that transformed the postal network into an ethical and political experiment. Drawing on the notions of heterotopia, technology of the self, counter-apparatus, profanation, and politics of the sensible, it examines how the circulation of images reconfigures the relations between body, desire, risk, and memory. The aim is to understand the Second International Mail Art Exhibition on AIDS (Salvador, 1995) not as a documentary record of the epidemic but as an operation of thought and life that subverts institutional ways of speaking suffering and governing pleasure. In letters, envelopes, and collages exchanged among anonymous participants, art does not represent trauma: it elaborates it, creating time, language, and space for care of the self and of others. The postal system becomes a heterotopia of sharing, where images act as gestures of resistance and reinvention of presence. By returning to the common sphere the signs once captured by stigma, mail art affirms the link between aesthetics and ethics and teaches a minimal grammar of survival: to elaborate without erasing, to care without moralizing, to remember without fetishizing pain. From this perspective, mail art is understood as a form of thought that makes the common breathe and restores to language its function as shelter