The material, curated and exhibited in different formats (screens, audios with letters read by its protagonists and a mural of postcards to look at and read) is part of the compilation work of the Epistolary Documentation Center. We chat with Mateo Niro, director of the Center and organizer of the exhibition.
Journalist: When and why did you start with the collection of letters, as an archive beyond the sample?
Matthew Niro: The epistolary archive began as a personal initiative at the beginning of the year 2000 under the premise of somehow preserving family correspondence. Over time, many interested people, specialists from different disciplines and various entities joined, which allowed the current collection to be formed, which has more than 20,000 letters, postcards and telegrams.
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Q.: How did you come up with putting together the sample?
MN: We promote the samples as instances of awareness about the value of these written testimonies and the importance of their preservation. Also, as a tool for the circulation of these testimonies and as recognition of personal stories as a framework of general social history. In the specific case of Mar de Cartas, the exhibition about Mar del Plata, is fundamental due to its demographic immigrant constitution and its tourist tradition.
Q.: Do you consider yourself a collector?
MN: I don’t consider myself a collector. Maybe yes, I’m more interested in files. But beyond my individual inclinations, I believe that what is relevant in these questions are collective actions. The Epistolary Documentation Center is an open and collaborative archive both for the preservation of primary sources and for their circulation. Anyone who so wishes can access the material at www.sobrecartas.com and also share their own information.
Q.: What was the basis for selecting the information and how was the procedure?
MN: Through all this time, the archive already had the material for the exhibition. What we undertook was the curatorship of the exhibition based on a timeline that narrates the most relevant social and political events from the founding of the city to the present day and recurring themes in the letters that left and arrived in Mar del Plata: love and heartbreak, vacations, immigration, among others. In addition, we dedicate a preferential space to the famous postcards from Mar del Plata, and we present a chronology of their transformation during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Likewise, you can listen to great stories through letters read by their protagonists and learn about original objects and letters.
Q.: Did you want to get any cards that you couldn’t get?
MN: Since we are dedicated to working with personal letters, we don’t really know what we are missing. That’s why each new card is a celebration of an expanding world.
Q.: What is the contribution of the municipality and Torreón to the project?
MN: All this is the result of a collective task and not only from the personal, but from the institutional as well. Mar de Cartas is an initiative that we develop together with the Torreón del Monje, one of the most emblematic places in Mar del Plata, as well as with institutions such as the Municipality, the National University of Mar del Plata and the Library of Congress of the Nation. , among other.
Q.: How does the community participate in this project? What returns do you have?
MN: The archive is constitutively community. To share correspondence, the interested persons only have to take a photo or scan the letter, postcard or telegram and send it to info@sobrecartas.com or through our Instagram at @sobrecartas.ar. Or it can be published directly on the page sobrecartas.com. The feedback we get is amazingly good, both with the new material and with the loving feedback on the sample and homework.
Source: Ambito
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