Gaspar Núñez

“Much has been written about the relationship between museums and mausoleums, between archives or storehouses for works of art and dumps or mass graves, and between curators, rag-and-bone men and gravediggers. In the case of Alberto Heredia, the connection is much more metaphorical, since his work is physically constructed from rubbish and, since his house was also his studio, his daily life consisted of continuously loading and unloading of waste.

Heredia’s work has often been approached from the perspective of surrealism precisely because of the similarity between those physical waste dumps and the tangled accumulation of the unconscious. From that point of view, it appears certain practices – such as theory, historiography and curatorship – detect small findings in that shapeless mass of waste and bring them to the conscious fore, like words holding out a chilling cloak of lucidity. Meanwhile, the artist rescues rubbish without every managing to redeem it or strip it of its opacity, no matter how much he scrubs away at it.

But what happens in the case of poetry and its opaque language? Rafael Squirru – in addition to being a critic, essayist, manager and diplomat – was a poet, and many of his texts about artworks are written in verse. His criticism takes the form of poetry, in an echo of Friedrich Schlegel, who said, ‘Poetry can only be criticized by way of poetry. A critical judgment of art that is not, in turn, a work of art has no place in the realm of art’.

Being a ghost comes as an excess of life after death. But what happens in a museum that begins as a spectre, and only later takes on a body and image? What was once a ghost museum is now an inverted museum: a realm of art, our residual neighbourhood.

For the residency at Casa Alberto Heredia, I would like to operate according to his method of loading and unloading waste. Working at the Documentation Centre of the Museo Moderno and with their documentary archives, I will search catalogues, newspaper clippings, correspondence and the like, for ekphrastic poetry discussing works or artists that could later be brought together in a publication. This work raises the question of whether poetry can be read as documentary record without losing its unassailable marginal nature, and whether, in that tension, a poetic historiography of art can be established that, in alignment with Schlegel, maintains its principle of citizenship and good neighbourliness.”