Spectres of Antoni Mercader

by Ignasi Gozalo Salellas

A few weeks ago, I was writing about the duty of conducting a visual archaeology of Barcelona when, suddenly, everything slowed down, giving even more meaning to that forgotten past. By two different paths, I received the news of Antoni Mercader’s death; a researcher, creator, and weaver of infinite cultural alliances for more than fifty years in Catalonia. Life interrupts the flow of academic production and imposes the tempo of mourning: to pause and walk backwards.

A singular figure who arrived in the Catalan capital in the 1960s from the provinces, he was a key player in Catalan conceptual and visual art for decades, dedicated until his last day to explaining the expanded condition of the audiovisual. Venturing beyond the cinematic hegemony of much of the 20th century, Mercader left a lasting mark on many artists, practitioners, and researchers interested in the post-cinematic world; whether as a professor, art historian, curator, museum advisor, director, producer, or multimedia programmer. We all have our own personal and non-transferable experience of Mercader.

The intangible yet rhizomatic dual nature of his expansive shadow forms what I would define as the Mercader spectre. The great cultural thinker of our time, Mark Fisher (2018), reclaimed two concepts from a more unexpected Derrida for the 21st century: “spectre” and “hauntology” are today the ontological condition of much of our reality; one that «is only possible on the basis of a series of absences that precede it, surround it, and allow it to possess consistency and intelligibility.”

The spectre’s space lies halfway between what is no longer and what is yet to come, as Martin Hägglund suggests in Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (2008). The Mercader spectre is an infinite dialogue between the promise of future images and all the material traces of the past: machines, books, recordings, archives, programming, codes, schematics, or short voice messages…

Together with the other Antoni of the Catalan visual arts scene, Muntadas, they were prominent members of the Grup de Treball (1972–1975), after an early start at the Faculty of Engineering in Barcelona where, by the mid-60s, they created the experimental group Machines, formed by young visionaries, interdisciplinary thinkers, and lovers of the transformative power of machines. Looking in the rearview mirror at the fixing nature of celluloid, the two Antonis led the avant-garde push of a new radical artistic expression that arrived in Catalonia thanks to them in the mid-seventies: video art.

Antoni Mercader, fotografia de l’autor

From those pioneering years of community and participatory video, guerrilla TV, or ephemeral television stations like those of Distrito 1 or Cadaqués Canal Local, mostly led by Muntadas, only a few photographic records, clumsy analog archives, and some “safeguarded” working documents remain in contemporary museum archives. But above all, one foundational and transformative book remains in the spectral space: En torno al Vídeo (1980), co-written by the two Antonis, Joaquim Dols, and Eugeni Bonet.

Paul Ricoeur would affirm in Memory, History, Forgetting (2000) that memory is an active process against forgetting, made up of specific selections from the past and resignifications in the present. For Ricoeur, forgetting has a necessary component: to allow for the future and to give meaning to the past. However, in the recent history of Spain and Catalonia, and Barcelona in particular, forgetting has also been a deliberate act of homogenizing the legacy of the seventies, in which radical voices like Mercader’s were excluded from collective representation.

Returning home these days and finding so many traces of Mercader; the iconic book, its reissues, our recorded conversations, the master’s thesis (The Years of the Void) I partly dedicated to his role in the Grup de Treball; is like giving voice again to new languages and ways of making culture. It is to do so from a spectral space, a scarcely inhabited apartment, but one full of memories and absences, between past and future, as Mercader himself was: a latent presence that has long rested on the shelves of a country’s cultural memory.

Ignasi Gozalo Salellas, Barcelona, 2025

An extended version of this text was originally published in:
ComeIn (Número 155, junio de 2025: https://www.uoc.edu/divulgacio/comein/es/numero155/articles/i-gozalo-les-materialitats-de-la-memoria-i-d-oblits-arxius-i-espectres-d-antoni-mercader.html)