Graciela Taquini

Graciela Taquini was born in Buenos Aires on 1 July 1941. She later described herself as the first university-educated woman in her family. Her father was a lawyer and rector of Comercial No. 1 in Buenos Aires, where he created a theatre and an active school cooperative; from her mother she inherited cinephilia. As a child and teenager she attended an English school, a state school, and Colegio Santa Rosa, leaving with the title of Maestra Normal Nacional. She frequented the Instituto Di Tella when her formal art-history curriculum still stopped at Cubism, and after time in Europe she became a devotee of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC). Around 1975 she was strongly marked by the ethnographic films of Jorge Prelorán, work she saw as living at the margins of the Argentine canon.

At the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of the Universidad de Buenos Aires she qualified as profesora and licenciada in History of the Arts, graduating in 1969 and serving as assistant in the medieval art chair. In 1971-72 the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica awarded her a scholarship for study at Universidad Central de Barcelona. She also studied at the Università per Stranieri (Perugia/Siena) and, after teaching at Bennington College in Vermont in 1980-81, completed a museography internship at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Across later decades she taught film history, art history, and curatorship at UBA (including FADU), Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Universidad Maimónides, Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (master's programmes in curatorship and electronic arts), ENERC, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, UADE, and several fine-arts and ceramics schools in the Buenos Aires region.

From 1979 until about 2013 Taquini worked inside cultural bodies of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, beginning at the Museo José Hernández and becoming a programmer, juror, and adviser across cinema and video. With the return of democracy she helped build exhibition circuits for video installations and new media, collaborating with the Centro Cultural San Martín, the Goethe-Institut, and the Centro Cultural Rojas. She advised the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Palais de Glace on video and new media. As curator she organised Argentine selections abroad (Colombia, Cuba, France, Spain, Peru, Portugal, Uruguay and elsewhere), curated Horizonte for Champ Libre in Montreal (2004), and took part in Proyecto Intercampos (Fundación Telefónica, 2007) and Paralelas y meridianos (Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 2010). In 2011 Centro Cultural Recoleta mounted her retrospective Grata con otros in Sala Cronopios. In 2020 she launched Legado.ar, an independent living archive of experimental audiovisual and technological art directed with a large interdisciplinary team and widened in 2024. From 2013 she was a full member of the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes (sitial No. 13, Fernán F. de Amador). She also served on the board of Fundación Federico Jorge Klemm.

Taquini began producing her own video works in 1988 with Roles, a foundational performative self-portrait of Argentine video art that mixed live performance with personal photographs, television clips, and film fragments to ask who Graciela was in the eyes of others. Later single-channel pieces include Psycho x Borges (1997), Play/rec (2000), Lo sublime/banal and Granada (2005), Resonancia, Cuerpo, Cadáveres, Borderline, Sísifa and Secretos (mid-2000s), Quebrada, El mundo de..., Qué hay entre los unos y los ceros, ROTA, Lugar común and Fin del mundo (2008-11), Confín (2020), and Abuela de la nada (2021). Granada, made with survivor Andrea Fasani for a Museo de la Memoria exhibition in La Plata, re-edited testimony about state terror; Lo sublime/banal, which won first prize at Festival Videobrasil (2005), stages two friends' conflicting memories of meeting Julio Cortázar while cooking. Destino (2014), an interactive multimedia oracle of rhetorical questions, won the Gran Premio Adquisición of the Salón Nacional (Nuevos Soportes). In 2018 she directed the 63-minute feature La obra secreta at Casa Curutchet, produced by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat. Her videos entered collections including CaixaForum Barcelona, IVAM Valencia, and Argentine museums; Roles and Lo sublime/banal later appeared in Bienalsur's Interferencias intersticiales at Centre Pompidou Málaga.

Taquini lived and worked for decades in Buenos Aires, including in Caballito in later years. Friends and colleagues called her Grata or Gratillas. In interviews she said she was not a grandmother to anyone, despite being over eighty, and turned that refusal into the slogan "Abuela tu abuela," a protest against ageism and the soft stereotype assigned to older women. She spoke of a cinephile formation shared with a film-critic partner in the 1980s and of long collaborative friendships with artists and curators across generations. Public obituaries name surviving nieces who were with her at Sanatorio Dupuytren; the names of a spouse or children were not published in the national notices checked. She remained professionally active into 2025-26, including recognition events and ongoing Legado.ar work.

Taquini described herself as "un poco anarquista" and treated video art as a mobile practice that could shake fixed places, languages, and hierarchies. In an interview with Mercedes Osswald she said video art's task was to shake what is fixed, subvert places, and juxtapose elements and languages, so that stillness becomes a choice rather than a rigid default. She preferred residual, unsettling works to polite ones, cultivated friendship as a method, and used Legado.ar to privilege women and non-hegemonic experimental practices over market consecration. Curator Rodrigo Alonso recalled that she introduced him to video art, protected friends, refused silence before abuse or injustice, and worked to empower women's practices. In her last years the cry "Abuela tu abuela" framed an explicitly intergenerational, feminist refusal of passive old age. Collaborators such as Natalia Rizzo remembered her parting line after long days at the Centro Cultural San Martín: "Hasta la victoria... siempre."

Argentine institutions and peers marked her death as the loss of the person who first carried the torch of video art nationally, often alongside Rodrigo Alonso. Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes president Sergio Baur called her indispensable for understanding contemporary Argentine art and technological languages. Matilde Marín stressed her red hair, humour, and solidarity with artists. Alonso said she pushed him into the field and remained an intimate friend. Through Legado.ar she left a living archive and research platform rather than a closed catalogue. Her works remain in museum collections in Argentina and Europe, in teaching curricula on electronic arts, and in the memory of generations of students and collaborators she mentored without regard to pedigree. A chapel response at Cementerio de la Chacarita was announced for the Sunday after her death.

Major distinctions included the Premio Konex de Platino in Video Arte and Diploma al Mérito (Fundación Konex, 2012); first prize at the 15th Festival Videobrasil (2005) for Lo sublime/banal; Premio a la Acción Multimedia from the Asociación Argentina de Críticos de Arte (2005); mention of honour at the Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales and third prize Mamba-Fundación Telefónica for Granada (2005); Gran Premio Adquisición of the Salón Nacional, Nuevos Soportes, for Destino (2014); Premio Igualdad Cultural from the national culture ministry (2013); recognition as Personalidad Destacada of the Universidad de Buenos Aires (2021); and service as a Konex Visual Arts juror (2022). Earlier script prizes included Leonardo Estarico (1999) and a national culture ministry award for Play Rec (2001). From 2013 she held sitial No. 13 at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes.

Beyond gallery video she wrote for catalogues and books on aesthetics, video history, and art-technology relations. Canal Encuentro devoted a full episode of Los visuales to her career. VernissageTV filmed her 2011 Recoleta retrospective. She maintained a YouTube channel (@taquinigraciela) hosting works such as Roles, Granada, Cadáveres, Sísifa, Confín and others, and a Vimeo account. The feature La obra secreta (2018) toured Argentina and the Southern Cone. Press often pictured her signature bright red hair; Clarín and Info Arte profiles in 2024 framed her as still "en movimiento" while launching Legado.ar's community work. After her death La Nación, La Izquierda Diario and cultural institutions circulated tributes calling her both matriarch and "punk roja" of Argentine video art.

Taquini died in the early morning of 19 September 2026 at Sanatorio Dupuytren in the City of Buenos Aires. She was 85 and had been living with cancer. Relatives told La Nación she was accompanied by her nieces and friends. Funeral arrangements announced a responso (chapel response) for Sunday at 11:00 in the chapel of Cementerio de la Chacarita. Cause of death was reported in the press as cancer; further medical detail was not made public beyond that reporting.