A networked avant-garde: Serbian, French and Spanish surrealists

Abstract

The surrealist avantgarde movement has set the ideological and cultural globalization processes into the very heart of their individual and collective research, relentlesly erasing geopolitical as well as artistic, cultural, linguistic and psychological borders alike. The cooperation and exchange of ideas among French, Spanish and Serbian surrealists was rooted in their personal aquaintances and personalised contacts starting from the 1920s. From 1923 to 1928, a rich network of contacts was built, while the widest and most prolific communication took place from 1929 to 1932, during the years of publishing the almanach Nemoguće-L'impossible (1930) and the magazine Nadrealizam danas i ovde (1931-1932) (Surrealism here and today). Surrealist have fully used the mailing in order to internationalize their movement. In addition to letters and postcards, almost daily they exchanged telegrams and packages that arrived at their resident addresses - those dispersed throughout Europe, but also the ones found within quarters of the same cities. This intranet established along the lines of French/ Spanish/Serbian cooperation, functionally removed Serbian surrealists from the geographical and cultural margines into a much wider net of communication that allowed a free flow of creative information, which altogether, whether coming from the centre or margines, offered equal participation in profiling globale contours of the surrealist avant-garde ideology.