Eugenio Dittborn
Nationality: Chilean
Born: 1943, Santiago, Chile

Eugenio Dittborn has a significant international presence as a leading Latin American artist who has been featured in numerous international group exhibitions. From the Chilean capital of Santiago where they originate, Dittborn's Airmail Paintings have traveled via international post to exhibition venues worldwide since 1983. Initially working under the isolation of the military dictatorship in Chile, Dittborn found a way to disguise his artwork, bypass the bureaucratic system and engage in the activities of the international art world by sending his items to galleries around the world. He silkscreens, paints, photographically prints and embroiders onto inexpensive, lightweight fabric and then folds the material for travel in cardboard airmail envelopes. The itineraries of each are written onto the envelopes which are displayed along with the unfolded work. The journeys, the distances spanned and the strategies uses to communicate are very much part of the work.

The subjects of the Airmail Paintings also address and make visible a variety of experiences that are forgotten or suppressed by official histories. Alongside authoritative sources, such as police records or historical photographs, Dittborn adds personal imagery, such as a photograph of his newborn daughter or images from mass media, such as a newspaper transcript of a woman's tale of surviving an earthquake. The artist says that his work is "a way of salvaging my previous work, which was threatened, like every other cultural production in Chile in these last years, with oblivion. Power in our country constructs a social, political and cultural space which is characterized by a monstrous capacity to empty and exclude any possibility of memory. My artistic work puts itself forward, in its travels, as a little model of a possible memory." The Airmail Paintings specifically produce alternative perspectives to Chile's history of colonial rule, Pinochet's dictatorship, and its current society, but the work also connects with contemporary art movements that recover the complexity of local histories and give voice to suppressed perspectives. His subtle political critique is all the more powerful because the works have a delicate, vulnerable and transitory quality similar to the information they convey.