And then there are the numbers. Some of them have an almost infinite field of associations - 1, 3, 7, 10, 12 - while others are very monosyllabic and emblematic: Agent 007, 141 Minutes of an Unfinished Sentence, Plot 301, jeans 501, 1001 nights. Still others are simply beautiful and mystical - 111, 555, 777 - and of course there are others that mean almost nothing: 261, 3765, 19140. If you leave a zero at the end - and zero is not much - you get a neutral sequence of numbers: 1-9-1-4 at first glance. In the next moment, however, we arrived in Europe and in Veszprém at the opening of the Transylvanian Days, the Mail Art project "1914".
This is a year of the one-dimensional kind, it would be a shame to deny it . But there is so much that happened in 1914 that we can think of! The Astoria Hotel opened in Budapest; MTK (Hungarian Bodybuilders Association football team) won the championship; the rules of fencing were laid down; Bohumil Hrabal, Klári Tolnay and Endre Bálint were born. Ödön Lechner, Pope Pius X and Otto Herman passed away. Yet, it is not these momentous events that usually come to mind, but another story: the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was taken by an assassin's bullet and the First World War broke out. And with it the fate of millions of people - in the happy times of peace, obviously hoped for everyday - was sealed. It is one of the wonders of art that it can speak as never before about something that is on everyone's mind. And the peculiarity of mail art is that it is able to do all this, even on a serious subject in a liberated, playful and lively way. The hundreds of letters that have arrived in response to the invitation coded with the number 1914 here at the Sziveri János Institute of the University of Pannonia from all over the world, from the United States to Germany, Poland, Hungary and Japan are proof of this.
This creative power, the healing, liberating capacity of art also comes with responsibility. For example, art must also play its part in dealing with serious traumas such as a world war. Mapping, understanding, remembering and recalling are all tasks that art through its own means directly or indirectly must also do. This is sometimes a difficult struggle and it is easy to step on a mine, but it is not something to give up. And this is just as true for the painter, the filmmaker, the literary artist as it is for the mail art artist. Even if the latter starts each work knowing that he will give up in the end."
Ervin Zsubori, Arnolfini Archive
