Archive Stories

Marie's Mail Art

For the third consecutive morning I find my colleague Erica drawing at her desk. She’s filling dozens of paper sheets with different shades of pencil gray. The illustration is always the same – an “exploded” Goto glass pattern. Erica Toffanin, our stylist, is also an artist who loves to embark on what she calls “lavoretti”: practical, artistic endeavors that often translate into postcards. This time, she decided to opt for risograph printing, a manual, crafty technique that requires overlapping numerous grayscale layers to obtain the chosen tone and prints one color at a time. Erica manually creates the gray layers, one for each color channel. The gray’s intensity will affect the layer’s saturation. “This printing process produces a lot of imperfections, so each card will be different from the other. I like that.”

Erica isn’t the first to put so much work into creating a single Laguna~B postcard. On the contrary, the company’s marketing has been based on DIY greeting cards for decades. In the 90s, before social media was even an idea, postcard advertising was having a moment. Companies and businesses at any scale were printing their campaigns and logos on free cards and distributing them everywhere. So when Marie Brandolini founded Laguna~B in 1994, having postcards to promote her business came naturally. Only she made them her own way.

Marie was “a natural collagist” who “loved bringing disparate worlds together on paper,” says her mother, Béatrice, adding that collages were her first form of artistic expression as a child. Growing up, she acquired the habit of mailing homemade postal cards to her friends – like a collage addressed to Laudomia Pucci, with different patterns and a cutout Niki de Saint Phalle sculpture arranged over a pink Pucci pattern.

When the necessity arose to stay in touch with the company’s clients (who, at first, were often also friends), she started composing her own “correspondence art.” She combined cutouts of the things she loved the most – her children, the household dog, Gipsy, Venice, the Gotos – with landscape elements, marker-pen sketches, and notes, resulting in surreal, naif compositions with a dadaist vibe. In fact, Marie’s postal cards more closely resemble artworks from the Mail Art movement – like Fluxus and The New York Correspondence School, whose work I’m sure she thoroughly enjoyed – than promotional materials. Playing with a standard, usually formal format, she created her own stamps, her personal “tourist views,” wrapping her messages within flat, rectangular works of art.

Trying to trace down the inspirations behind the postcards, Béatrice gifted us a decorated cardboard box, saying it contained the key to understanding her daughter’s aesthetic taste and references. It stores around 300 postcards collected from our founder’s visits to museums around the world. Flipping through the collection, I found paintings by Joan Mirò, Kandinskij, Mondrian, Matisse, Calder, and Picasso, surrealist works by Max Ernst, and photos of Rodin’s sculptures, Japanese prints, and 17th-century Dutch paintings, alongside Renaissance art like Raffaello’s and Masaccio’s. Though Mirò, Matisse, and Calder definitely outnumber all others.

According to her childhood friend Laudomia Pucci, Marie used to carry postcards in her bag all the time and loved to present them to whoever seemed interested in her glassware. “She gave her postcards away at every dinner party in the most natural way.” In a ‘90s photo from the Archive – perhaps taken at one of those dinner parties? - Marie is smiling, embracing her husband Brandino, and proudly showing a postcard to the camera.

This particular form of correspondence – emptied of a real commercial function and filled with intimacy, humor, and affection – proved particularly enduring in the company and is still alive and well in Marcantonio’s era.

While most brands reach their public on social media in rather fast, impersonal ways, he perceives the act of mailing handwritten thoughts as a celebration of real-life human interactions and a more authentic form of networking. “Postcards allow you to send personal messages to real people. Our communication is made by human beings, and when we send a note, a Polaroid, or a card to a friend or client, it’s because we actually care about them. We put a lot of time and creativity into our postcards.”

Since he took over the company in 2016, Marcantonio has made sure to commission limited-edition, artistic postcards regularly. Dozens were created by Pixel T, a friend and creative soul who collaborated with our team for years. His illustrations featured the Goto in the most surprising ways, like one from 2017, where the tumblers are surrounded by X-rays in a surreal night landscape. Another 2019 project, P.O.V., celebrated mail art in a call for alternative perspectives on Venice. The selected works – spanning from photography to illustration to digital art – were turned into postcards and distributed in newsstands and stationery shops around the city.

After 30 years, this romantic tradition still thrives. In the doom-scrolling era, where content is fast and volatile, the idea that a small, nice gesture on paper won’t get lost in the cloud is soothing. Long life to mail art!

The Laguna~B Archive is an ongoing project created in collaboration with Promemoria Group. If you want to access the digital archive, you can request a temporary login here.