AU MA + Gom@: An introduction

This new group has arisen from a spontaneous way. It was not the intention when the 20 of October of 1998, in the occasion of the halting of the Chilean ex--dictator and life-senator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London by a request of extradition by a Spanish judge. The Boek861 had the idea to send a message to ten mail-artists of recognized prestige to try to support this idea of extradition and to support with the BB.AA professor. of the University of Chile, Humberto Nilo Saavedra, expelled from its chair after organizing a mail-art call under the motto of: " Freedom for the education of the Arts ". In hardly 48 hours an equipment made up had formed of:

César Reglero / Boek861 (Spain)
Tartarugo (Spain)
Clemente Padín (Uruguay)
Fernando García Delgado / Vórtice (Argentina)
Hans Braumüeller (Alemania)

With a rate of frenetic work, and using the electronic mail and Internet, in one week they mobilized a great number of mail-artists connected to the Network and these, as well, were in charge to contact with the thickness of mail-artists outside this Network by ordinary postal channel. Independently of the results, the certain thing was that this group of five people was consolidated when verifying the effectiveness of a "not planned planning", obeying simply to the impulse of the heart. As a result of it and while it continued the battle by the extradition of Pinochet, they went laying the foundations of which, later it would be "AU+MA". Group opened with very simple objectives:

To act urgently in those cases in which the group decides that the humanitarian cause, social, ecological or in defense of the Human rights requires our solidarity.

With this aim it was decided two channels of action:

- Own Projects
- Support other people projects

And, most important, to make a formal invitation to all the mail artists to join an independent project, of horizontal and nonhierarchic operation. The first direction of this initiative, is, obviously, those that have given foundation to the idea. That is to say, the adherents to the manifesto. Later, we will make all those mail-artists extensive who do not have e-mails. He is doubtless which, like group of mail-artists, we will act preferredly collaborating with our works, without discarding another type of supports and manifestations that require a fast intervention by the urgency of the case.

From these moments, the delay of your suggestions had left to be modeling this embryo of active project within the field of the social action.