GRRR | Guillermo Deisler

About the author

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 „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. In 1988 he organized the exhibition “Visuelle Poesie” (“Visual Poetry”) together with Karla Sachse. Two years later he edited the anthology “wortBILD. Visuelle Poesie in der DDR” (“wordIMAGE. Visual Poetry in the GDR”) together with Jörg Kowalski. In every country Deisler lived in he published original graphic artists books in circulations between three and 50, amongst them “GRRR” in Chile in 1969, “le cerveaux”  in France in 1975, in 1977 “packaging poetry” in Bulgaria and in 1988 “make-up” in the GDR. His Mail Art project “Federn der ganzen Welt für meinen Flug” (“Feathers of the whole world for my flight“) had been shown in Annaberg-Buchholz in 1989 and furthermore – during the autumn demonstrations – in Berlin. This project is today at Schloß Friedenstein in Gotha.

On October 21, 1995 he died of cancer in Halle, Germany.