The Roberto Scala Mail Art Collection and Archive brings together more than 150 works by Italian and international artists, offering significant testimony to the vitality and international diffusion of Mail Art, or Postal Art, within the field of contemporary artistic research.
Mail Art is an artistic practice that uses the postal system as a means of artistic expression, communication, and dissemination. The journey of the artwork, the exchange between artists, and the relationships established through correspondence become an integral part of the creative process. Drawings, collages, photographs, postcards, envelopes, artist-designed stamps, postmarks, texts, and visual interventions thus become instruments of an artistic practice founded on sharing, participation, and the free circulation of ideas.
The archive also documents the international dimension of this practice through artworks and correspondence originating from different cultural and geographical contexts. The collection therefore constitutes not merely an ensemble of artworks, but a network of artistic relationships, exchanges, and testimonies, in which postal communication becomes an integral part of the artistic experience.
Among the Italian and international artists represented in the collection are:
Vittore Baroni, Anna Boschi, Pier Roberto Bassi, Franco Ballabeni, Mirta Caccaro, Alfonso Caccavale, Mimmo Di Caterino, Lamberto Caravita, Bruno Cassaglia, Different Opinion (D.O.), Claudio Jaccarino, Ruggero Maggi, Massimo Medola, Moreno Menarin, Emilio Morandi, Nino La Rosa, Roberto Formigoni, Muro Maya Lopez, Diego Racconi, Stefano W. Pasquini, Oronzo Liuzzi, Claudio Romeo, Roberto Scala, Robert Stairs, Antonio Sassu, Serse Luigetti, Giovanni and Renata StraDADA, Gian Paolo Terrone, and, internationally, David Dellafiora, Dórian Ribas Marinho, Hugo Pontes, Rémy Penard, Ryosuke Cohen, Keiichi Nakamura, David Medalla, Susanne Mitterwieser, Lars Schumacher, Susanne Schumacher, Dadanautk, Horst Tress, Rittiner & Gomez, Clemente Padín, John M. Bennett, Honoria Starbuck, Picasso Gaglione, Anna Banana, André Radke (Etcetera23), Jon Foster, and Untzilla Mikel.
The collection therefore represents an artistic and documentary archive dedicated to Mail Art, offering evidence of the diversity of languages and approaches employed by artists and of the international character of a practice founded on exchange, collaboration, and the free circulation of artworks and ideas.
