For Guillermo Deisler /VisPo Book by Bruno Chiarlone Debenedetti

Guillermo Deisler was born June 15, 1940 in Santiago de Chile. He studied stage design and theatre graphics. From 1967 to 1973 he was university assistant and lecturer for graphics at the Universidad de Chile  in Antofagasta. After the military coup on September 11, 1973 he was arrested for two month. Friends managed to get him a French visa so that he could emigrate to Paris. After a few month in exile he felt like there is no livelihood for him and his family in France. He decided to move to the former GDR. There he met some Chilean refugees in Eisenhüttenstadt. Due to decisions made by Chilean comrades and to an agreement between the socialist states he was „banned“ (Deisler) to Bulgaria as a quota refugee. Still, he worked together with the theatre director Hans-Uwe Haus on a regular basis, and on various projects in the GDR and in Greece. Only in 1986 he was allowed to get back to the GDR. Deisler lived, on to his death, in Halle/Saale, where he worked at the opera. He engaged himself intensely in experimental and visual poetry and founded the artists- and Mail Art project “UNI/vers(;)” in 1987, which he kept running, with 35 issues, up to his death 1995.  His archive with over 5000 Mail Art pieces is today in the archives of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. His works are at Sächsische Landesbibliothek Dresden, at the Schiller-Nationalmuseum/Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, at Sackner-Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry in Miami as well as at the Public Library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

 Learn more about Deisler on the Mail Art Index.