Intacta Materia: El archivo de Álvaro Mutis en su centenario

The Gabriel García Márquez House of Literature joins the celebrations on the centennial of Álvaro Mutis’s birth with Intacta materia, an exhibition of the author’s archive that takes the viewer on a biographical journey. The exhibition contains writing, images, correspondence and objects owned by a central character during an extraordinary period for Latin American art and literature.

At the very start, a childhood spent between Belgium and the coffee finca in Coello, a space that would become a central motif in his poetic works. Later, among his earliest writings we find his first poem, written mere minutes before going in to work as a radio host in Bogotá. We can also find the first and only edition of La Balanza—his first collection of poems—which went out-of-stock by fire when it burned down in the riots that followed Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s assassination, later dubbed El Bogotazo. We can see records of his time in Lecumberri, Mexico’s main prison, when he first approached the narrative form with his Diario de Lecumberri, as well as of his multiple and very diverse employments in Mexico City. Finally, we find his correspondence with Eliseo Diego, Octavio Paz, Fernando Botero, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez, a correspondence that shows him as a nodal figure in a period of generalized and unprecedented creative effervescence.

The opening of Intacta materia will serve as the setting for two book presentations: Nocturna, edited by Libros del Kultrum and Zalipoli, collecting in one volume, for the first time, every Nocturne that Mutis wrote; and De lecturas y otras celebraciones, a new anthology of brief prose writings edited by El Equilibrista. In the event will be participating María Baranda, Juan Esteban Constaín, Francisco Goldman and Pura López Colomé.

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