Cover illustration.The Stream of Consciousness, as it flows in Retailia.

EMANATIONS

The United Queendom of Retailia

Patron of Small Furry Animalsand Protector of Everything that Crawls

Welcome!

Situated somewhere in MailArtMartha’ s brain theUnited Queendom of Retailia grew from the ancientQueendom of Artsnailia, where Snail Mail Art has flour-ished from time immemorial, that is since 1998. FromArtsnailia Queen Martha the First marched to the con-quest of the world of retail at the handle of her ShoppingTrolley Gallery taking mail art where no mail art hasgone before.

Eventually. in 2012, andafter fourteen years ofshocking poor shoppersin the retail outlets ofRetailia and beyond, TheShopping Trolley Galleryburnt down in the GreatFire of Snailmail -on-Sea,victim of a terrorist at-tack.

July 27, 2014, saw the birth of the Front Door Gallery,which shows were documented in the InternationalUnion of Mail Artists site. The new Shopping TrolleyGallery is seen inside. This lighter and faster sportsmodel is the ceremonial version of the old STG, whichwas burnt in the Great Fire as already reported.

To Artsnailia has been annexed Cloudcuckooland,populated by dreamers and where the Queen has hersummer residence, Cloud Nine. The Queendom is bordered on three sides by theKingdom of Encroaching Reality and on the fourth bythe Sea of Escapism. Snailmail-on-Sea is the capital city and its social, culturaland religious hub.It is said that its streets are paved with Mail Art...

i

The Retailian coat of arms is divided in three fields. Thetop field is an echo of the original pennant of the Realmwhich is now embodied in the National Flag , the lefthas a Spiral and the right a Cuckoo on a Cloud repre-senting Artsnalia and Cloudcuckooland respectively. On top is the Royal Crown in gold decorated with aShopping Trolley flanked by two Cauliflowers, the na-tional flower of Retailia. On each side of the shield thesupporters are two rampant snails with an envelope intheir mouth representing deliberation and persever-ance in the pursuit of Mail Art.

The motto translates as probably

This, the National Anthem of Retailia, is only onestanza long because, according to Count HenrickShline von Uberwald,“all real patriots can never re-member more than one verse of their anthem and getthrough the subsequent verses by going ”,as Sir Terry Pratchet has reported.

The Retailian deep blue flag with whitespots reminds us of Vacuity and Dotti-ness, the virtues that characterize oursovereign and are expected of all goodsubjects to the Queen. Some say, un-kindly, that she is off her trolley. Nottrue, our Queen still is very much onher trolley.

This local beauty is adorned with the NationalFlower of Retailia, the cauliflower. The likenessof this gorgeous girl to our beloved Queen isnot coincidental, the Queen’s grandfather waswell known for his love of the people.

i Tourism thrives in the Queendom, attractedeach season by the beauty of the AffordableRange with its highest peak, Mount Sales. In this region, in the winter and summerseasons, many bargain hunters are seen,searching for the Great Bargain and also forthe more elusive beast, the Lesser SpottedBargain .

The National Dish is not snails, of which thereare plenty in Artsnalia, because they are aprotected species in the Queendom.

Fertile Retailia, bathed by the Stream of Conscious-ness, has abundant natural renewable resources ofimagination, creativity and sheer nerve which sustain athriving manufacturing industry. Its main exports are Art Postcards, Artistamps,Artist’ s Trading Cards and Trashpo.

Recently the Queendom has acquired a worldwidereputation for the production of excellent Trashpo.

The raw material is completely home grown by hu-mans aided by foxes and other wild life in the playingfields and urban open spaces of the realm .

The especially trained sniffer dogs harvest the trashwhich is then transported by shopping trolley to theassembly line in The Studio, the quaint name given tothe Retailian main industrial complex.

Here is some Trashpo ready to ship

The DKULT Food Strainers are fang-made by TrashpoSniffer dogs in the derelict open spaces of the UnitedQueendom of Retailia.

First the dogs sniff out a sock, then they thrash itabout until enough holes develop when it becomesready to pack and ship worldwide. The thrashingprocess, dependent as it is not only on the weatherbut also on the mood of the dogs and the quantityand quality of the holes, takes from three to eightmonths. There are therefore three types: holy, moreholy and positively saintly.

Warning: Do not wash after use.It may clean up and affect the taste of your food

Strain-

Retailia is also the main manufacturer of DKult, themiracle drug that is currently the buzz in medicalcircles worldwide.

RECOMMENDED BY DOCTORS IF YOU :HAVE A DISORDER WHICH CAUSES EXCESSIVE RATIONALITY

HAVE OR HAVE EVER HAD AN IMPULSE TO PAINT PRETTY FLOWERSBEFORE YOU TAKE DKULT DO NOT TAKE DKULT IF YOU ARE ALLERGIC TO ORIGINAL THINKINGPOSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS LIKE ALL MEDICINES DKULT CAN CAUSE SOME MILD SIDE EFFECTS. IF YOU EXPERIENCE ANY OF THE FOLLOWING, ENJOY !

AN URGE TO PICK UP ROAD KILL RELUCTANCE TO THROW AWAY ANY RUBBISH STICKY GRUBBY FINGERS

FOR FAST EFFECTIVE RELIEF OF REALITY ISSUES

WARNING: EXCEED THE STATED DOSE

CONTAINS IMAGINATION

MAXIMUM STRENGTH

DKULT

By appointmentto Her Majesty the Queen

Product of the United Queendom of

The Retailian currency is the Marth which has aFixed Exchange Rate (or FER) of nought PoundsSterling or zero American Dollars. The FER is farsuperior to the FTSE, the NIKKE and the JohnDow put together and a financial measurewhich other countries would do well in adopting.

The official religion of the Queen-dom is a shaman based CyclicalPolytheism, in which a differentgod or goddess is worshipped eve-ry week in turn, to be on the safeside. Religious scholars have calcu-lated that there are enough deitiesat present in this world, or ratherin the other, to last until the middleof June 3462, after which it willbecome necessary to start recy-cling from the beginning or createa few more. Unless global warmingtakes its toll or the sun explodes orwe just get bored.

In this page we see Purcha-sia, the Goddess of Marketsand Malls, pushing a shop-ping trolley, an old imagealready with the motto:

The ancient gold figurine below represents ashaman with animal headgear and what appearsto be a ceremonial shopping trolley as it has nowheels, probably full of magic Mail Art mush-rooms .This cult precedes any other and it issurmised that it was given up as shopping whileintoxicated was a bad bargain.

We have seen Retailia as a thriving and progressivecommunity engaged in artistic pursuits where all ispeace and calm and good will, an ideal country every-body loves to visit and which is the envy of the world...

General Carlos Marth, head of theMarthist party and cousin of Her Majesty, is a constant

headache for the Queen with his revolutionary, some sayrevolting, ideas.

All Art is pure (non)sense. The sense of Art forthe refuses to be the same sense of Art for

. Art objects look down on us while wesense(suously) dance in Mindspace around them.If the (es)sense of art is its very lack of(es)sense its meaning is not.A nouveau (non)sense(ationalist) movement hasbeen created by Me, El Generalisimo, and it is ascion of post modern structuralism, aided bythe system of differences contained in themechanical and metaphysical signification ofelectronic technology.Art has come to mean (re)production of the artartefact. Its (re)creation is the new original.The (evane)sense of the original isboth signifier and signified of an identifica-tion with the ideal of (joy)sense. This innate(joy)sense has to be recovered after it is takenaway by the Other.

Reproduced here is Gen. Marth manifesto, or as helikes to call it, the Marthfesto.

MailArtMarthaThe United Qeendom of Retailia

First edition January 2012Second edition December 2014