Matthew Lopez’s play The Inheritance is about different generations of gay men in New York City: those of today and those of yesterday, those who fought for their rights and against AIDS and its stigmatization. The legacy referred to in the title is “that of history, community and self.”
In recent months we have lost two people to whom we owe a lot. Montse Guillén lived in New York in the 1980s and suffered the loss of many of her friends. One of them, Keith Haring, had her help in managing the permits and finding a location in Barcelona for the mural Tots junts podem parar la sida (Together we can stop AIDS) (1989). Miralda’s partner and accomplice, Montse Guillén made a unique contribution with her way of linking culinary innovation with artistic creativity. With Miralda they created the restaurant El Internacional in New York and the FoodCultura project, a visionary proposal that explores the interrelationships between cuisine, art and science, and that collects, archives and activates aspects of human identities, rituals and culinary traditions. Montse was an active, energetic, laughing person and always ready to embark on new adventures.
Just a few weeks later, Antoni Mercader, a pioneer of multimedia art in our country and member of the Grup de Treball, where he met Muntadas, among others, also left us. He was co-author, together with Eugeni Bonet, of the first book on video art published in Spain: En torno al vídeo (1980). For a couple of years, he was in charge of the Dilluns de Vídeo in La Virreina, programming representative tapes of the evolution of the medium. He played a key role in defining the Mediateca de la Caixa, directed by Carme Garrido, conceived as a large accessible archive that focused on the social use of new media. But, above all, Antoni Mercader was a generous person who shared his experience and knowledge while building bridges between generations of artists, critics and curators.
The generations that came after us, and also those that have come —and will come— after us, owe an immense debt to Montse Guillén and Antoni Mercader. For them, for Montse and Antoni, we are left with a deep feeling of esteem, homage and, above all, gratitude.
