Hunebed / Megalithic Tomb / Project 1983,
Drents Museum, Assen, 1983. (Ed. by Ko de Jonge)
In 1983 the Drents Museum in Assen, the Netherlands, mounted an exhibition on the hunebedden — the Neolithic megalithic tombs native to the province of Drenthe — and invited Dutch artist and mail-art networker Ko de Jonge to realize a parallel Mail Art project within that context. De Jonge's concept drew a direct analogy between the megalith and the postal network: just as the ancient tomb was built from stones carried from distant parts of the continent and united through collective effort, so too would his "Megalithic Tomb" be built from stones gathered by roughly 100 invited artists across Europe, mailed to Middelburg, and reassembled into a single sculptural monument for exhibition. The Call, issued through de Jonge's Postkode imprint, asked each participant to locate a natural stone, document its find-spot photographically or by drawing, and send both stone and documentation sheet to the organizer by 31 December 1982.
More than 50 artists from 19 European countries ultimately took part, sending stones from locations as varied as a Scottish anti-tank beach barrier, a Hungarian creek bed, a French prehistoric cave, and the Artpool courtyard in Budapest itself. The submissions ranged from straightforward geological documentation to conceptual and poetic interventions — Robert Świerkiewicz's "THIS IS A STONE" text-drawing, Lars Vilks's photographs of his Nimis driftwood sculpture at Kullaberg, and Joseph Huber's stone tied to his own long-running Dokumente einer Stadt project among them. The completed "megalith monument" was assembled and exhibited by de Jonge at the Drents Museum in 1983, with all documentary material displayed alongside it — situating the project within the broader early-1980s mail art tendency of using the postal system itself as a medium for collective, geographically dispersed sculpture.
