Building power from below.
Lecture and Artist Talk
Mariano Pacheco & Bruno Diego
Thursday, 14 May, 2026
16:00–18:00
As part of the exhibition Productive Unit at the Museum of Impossible Forms, writer and militant Mariano Pacheco will deliver a lecture followed by a conversation with the artist Diego Bruno.
Departing from the question of what a people can do when they move from victimhood towards struggle and self-organisation, the lecture traces the transformations of popular movements in Argentina over the past fifty years against the backdrop of neoliberal restructuring and the contemporary rise of the far right and authoritarian politics. Moving from the 1976 military coup and its project of state terror and economic liberalisation, the talk reflects on how the destruction of industrial labour and organised working-class life gave rise to new territorial and community-based forms of political organisation, from the Madres de Plaza de Mayo to the piquetero movement, feminist struggles, and the popular economy. Through these experiences, the presentation examines how collective infrastructures of care, self-management, and social reproduction emerged as forms of resistance to capitalist precarity and social fragmentation, while simultaneously shaping new political subjectivities and forms of militancy. It foregrounds the importance of studying and translating these experiences in order to imagine new political strategies and forms of solidarity across different contexts.
Mariano Pacheco is a writer, journalist, and militant whose work spans cultural criticism, political education, and social movement organising. He is currently a columnist on culture in radio and print media, editor of the “Contrataque” section of Resistencias magazine, and a member of the Buenos Aires Press Union. His work moves between philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and the history of Argentine social and political struggles, which he develops through research, publishing, and pedagogical initiatives. He coordinates the philosophy and mental health gatherings “Symptomatic Readings”, the “Horacio González” School of Philosophy at the Plebeyo Institute, and the Critical-Narrative Experimentation Laboratory at the “Aldo F. Oliva” Self-Managed School of Literature, while also researching at the Department of Literature and Society of the Floreal Gorini Cultural Cooperation Centre. Author of more than half a dozen books, he has long been involved in trade unions, grassroots educational projects, and militant editorial platforms, and participated in the founding of Argentina’s piquetero movement. Over the years, he has contributed to political formation processes across Latin America, including collaborations with Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), reporting from Cuba for Resumen Latinoamericano, and participation in the Louis Althusser International Colloquium in Bolivia. This marks his first visit outside Latin America.
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More info about Productive Unit exhibition and opening hours
The film has been produced and edited with support from AVEK, Koneen Säätiö, Linnamon Säätiö and Carbon Copy ky.
The exhibition at Museum of Impossible Forms is within the framework of Institution(ing)s a medium-scale collaboration project co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
