> Kairan /

Kairan is a zine by Gianni Simone, born in Italy he lives currently with his family in Japan. The zine is a "no copyright" publication specifically devoted to the discussion of Mail-Art related topics.

Kairan is Japanese for 'read and pass on', used in companies to circulate a document for knowledge and/or approval through different departments. Simone has chosen this name as his first idea was to circulate his zine, an idea he later dropped but the name remained.

Kairan started when Wilfried Nold (Germany) announced to end with his magazine Numero. Simone who had no earlier experiences with making a zine, got scared when Nold did send his address list and found out that it contained almost more then 900 correspondents from forty three countries. Yet, he took up the work Numero has left behind for several reasons. Simone joined the Mail-Art network in 1997 in a period when some influential zines as Global Mail from Ashley Parker Owens (U.S.A.) and Factsheet 5 (U.S.A.) were shutting down. Later he got to read Numero, but was saddened that number six he had ordered was the very last. He believed that a forum like Numero deserved a much longer life and followed Theo Breuer's (Germany) advice to contact Nold. The medium fascinated him and wanted to try it out himself. Another reason and for him the main one, why he took over the forum Numero created was that through the zine he wanted to make new contacts. As at the end of 1999 he felt he wanted to commit himself in Mail-Art more and more.

"The fact is, even though basically ours is a very democratic network, it's also true that newcomers find it sometimes difficult to establish contacts with the veterans. People who have been mail arting for 10-15 years or more, have seen and done so many things that it takes something special to make them notice a new mail artist. And I thought NUMERO was the right vehicle to raise other people's interest." (G. De Decker, personal interview, March, 2003)

In the early issues, Kairan appeared as a forum for ideas and artwork Simone collected and published. As the continuation of Numero a few items remained in Kairan, such as the "ABC of …" by Theo Breuer (Germany). Restarted again by Breuer in the first number of Kairan but later written by other Mail-artists. After a few issues Kairan went its own way, when the first issues were totally a free-for-all project he started to devote afterwards each issue to a certain theme. He did not like the early lack of direction, it was all too shapeless for him. Also there were a number of topics he wanted to explore more deeply while he thought that maybe sooner or later the incoming contributions could stop. So number three and four became experiments in the direction of a theme orientated zine, featuring a homage to Vittore Baroni's (Italy) and Piermario Ciani's (Italy) TRAX project, and Mail-Art from the Balkan. After that Simone started to receive ideas and suggestions from several Mail-artists and realised that even other people agreed with him and supported the zine its new direction. Later issues explored themes as the Mail-Art scene in Latin America, poetry and Fe-Mail-Art.

To state that the zine is "no copyright" Simone gives others the right to copy an issue and send it onwards to other interested readers. His goal is to make and send out at least 100 copies per number and after that only new copies are made on request.

Related Topics:
[01] Zine
[02] Copyright
[03] Mail-Art
[04] Nold, Wilfried
[05] Numero
[06] Address list
[07] Network
[08] Global Mail
[09] Parker Owens, Ashley
[10] Factsheet 5
[11] Breuer, Theo
[12] Democracy
[13] Forum
[14] Artwork
[15] Theme
[16] Topic
[17] Contribution
[18] TRAX
[19] Baroni, Vittore
[20] Ciani, Piermario
[21] Balkan
[22] Mail-artist
[23] Latin America
[24] Poetry
[25] Fe-Mail-Art

References:
[01] (G. Simone, personal interview, March, 2003) 
[02] Simone, G. (1999 - 2002). Kairan, 1 - 6.

Date last update: 13 March 2003