Locating Legibility in Mirtha Dermisache’s Asemic Writing

This article seeks to decipher the nature of illegibility during the complex political moment when Argentine Mirtha Dermisache’s writing arrived. The success of Dermisache’s graphisms hinges on an ambiguity; the writing further exemplified the challenges facing art practices utilized throughout the 1960s and 1970s in Argentina. Moreover, the article examines the nature of legibility in a tangled moment racked by censorship and ongoing violence, which grew to interrogate anyone perceived as acting against the state apparatus. The aim of my methodology is to make visible what have been the very invisible historical and contemporary discourses around disappearance and processes of language, simultaneously with Conceptualism in Argentina. In so doing, we might further situate a reading of Dermisache’s texts as illustrating more beyond the theoretical engagement with writing and offering an example of the tangles of information, context, and wider histories of repression that become imbued in her work and practice.