CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/15/2018

The enigmatic, unreadable writings of Mirtha Dermisache

So quiet, so dreamlike-familiar, so provocative—and enigmatic. Selected Writings, new from Siglio and Ugly Duckling Presse, collects the illegible, seemingly cryptographic, but in fact semantically contentless graphic writings of Mirtha Dermisache, who lived and worked under the Argentinean junta, and died in 2012. "I started writing and the result was something unreadable," she is quoted in the book. "In fact, illegibility is a key aspect of my work. With hindsight, I must admit that all my works create some tension between the communication formats offering a stable framework and the act of writing, which provides the unstable dimension. Maybe it's like saying that for me the liberation of the sign takes place within culture and history, and not on their margins. In this sense my work is not behind the times at all. Graphically speaking, every time I start writing I develop a formal idea that can be transformed into the idea of time. My work is characterized by movement. There are no closed forms."