“Con la participación del público”: Participation and Pedagogy in the Work of Mirtha Dermisache and Margarita Paksa

Though their work took many forms, Argentine artists Mirtha Dermisache and Margarita Paksa shared an analytical and open-ended approach to the art object. During Argentina’s military dictatorship, as many artists “abandoned” traditional art practices in favor of more direct political action, their collaborative impulses took the form of radical pedagogical methods. Dermisache organized a series of workshops known as the Jornadas del Color y de la Forma, transforming Buenos Aires’ Museum of Modern Art into an open “studio of creative actions for adults.” Meanwhile, Paksa offered drawing and painting classes to Peronist Youth groups in the villas miserias, evading paramilitary violence.

In the museum and in the streets, Dermisache and Paksa turned their work toward creating spaces of freedom in a constricted political environment. This paper examines the workshops they offered not as an abandonment of previous artistic practices but as an extension of the logic of participation and collaboration embedded in their work and in Latin American Conceptualism more broadly. Dermisache’s meticulous planning of the Jornadas, which included prints mapping out work tables and the collection of data on its participants, channels the laborious detail of her asemic writing. Likewise, Paksa, who participated in the planning of Tucumán Arde,reformulated a long engagement with the visual culture and political organizing of Latin American leftist movements. For both artists, pedagogy and aesthetics intersectedas utopian tactics of community-building and resistance. I argue, moreover, that their mobilization of collaborative and ambiguous processes of meaning-making formulated an inherently feminist and anti-authoritarian stance.