For a long time, I have been collecting postcards with mountains. Although I don’t quite remember how it all began, the words “Voglio vedere le mie montagne” have always surrounded the collection and the continued collecting. It means “I want to see my mountains.” These words were spoken by the Italian painter Giovanni Segantini, most famous for his large idyllic paintings of the Alps. In 1899, he lay on his deathbed in a small cabin in Switzerland. Suddenly, he asked to be lifted to the window to see his beloved mountains one last time.
After a few years of collecting, I started hearing stories about how my mother and her family would take road trips up north during the summer heat. Nothing unusual about that, perhaps, but one day my grandmother showed me her albums filled with postcards she had bought on those trips. It was postcard after postcard of mountains. It turned out that she was also a collector, and my grandmother’s postcards are now part of the collection, and the collecting continues.
In recent years, the collection has become the basis for the publication Postcards with Mountains, where artists select a postcard from the collection and then create a work based on the chosen postcard. In the publication, each artist has a spread, with the selected postcard usually shown on the left and the artist’s work on the right. It is a project that I believe is primarily about creation, where the chosen postcard becomes the artist’s starting point for a new piece. So far, there have been six publications featuring a total of seventy-three artists. It has been able to continue because the participating artists invite others to contribute to future volumes.
Martin Eltermann was born in 1985 in Skara. He began his artistic education at Kyrkerud Folkhögskola in Årjäng. After that, he attended both Valand Academy and Umeå Academy of Fine Arts. He now lives and has his studio in a house in Grums, Värmland. Collecting is something that recurs in the studio as well, something that is constantly repeated and ongoing. This is, in fact, a bit like how his art is.