Marc Navarro

The mail art group SIEP (Sàpigues i Entenguis Produccions) was founded in Reus in 1981 and, only three years later, disbanded. Throughout its short existence, nearly thirty people collaborated in the creation of more than fifty anonymous sendings, which periodically arrived by post to hundreds of recipients around the world. SIEP Ràbia i desencís (SIEP Anger and disenchantment) traces the group’s journey through a wide-ranging presentation of its production, which, in addition to the complete sendings, includes objects, photography, videos and publications.

The exhibition, which does not follow a chronological order, is structured around three fields of action: the organization of exhibitions, SIEP’s activity in the field of mail art, and the productions of the group while operating as a publishing platform until 1986. By gathering the group’s production into work areas, these categories expose in one hand, the diversity of artistic positions within the group, and on the other, their will to operate beyond disciplines and conventions.

The exhibition’s aims to highlight the relevance of collective work in a context, that of the early 1980s in the Camp de Tarragona, which was seeking to fit into an artistic map governed by centralism and institutionalization. Projects such as Visura plástica and Un corrent d’air fresc, both made in 1981, bear witness to the emergence of this associative spirit in the months immediately preceding the formation of the SIEP.

In an article about the group, historian Pere Anguera noted that SIEP arose from anger and disenchantment, “from anger against an imprisoned culture and a co-opting politics. From disenchantment with the too little that was noticeable in excessively numerous fields the incidence of the newly arrived democracy, which only confirmed privileges and prebends”. The exhibition highlights how SIEP’s production emerged as a response to this historical moment, that of post-francoism, and as a record of a remarkable collective artistic effort that, despite its playfulness, preserved carefully its radical and critical spirit.