Every project is born with a question, a hypothesis to solve. This book, like the agitation of the psyche, is the result of a proposal that sought to stimulate approximations to prosecute readings of the ESPAC Collection. How to articulate procedures to approach the collection and trace routes that lead to new groups, potentialities and readings?

This selection of works proposes a plan that reveals combinatory potentialities, approximations and readings. We are before a set of objects that, when defined as a collection, presuppose to be bearers of senses, tastes, anecdotes and meanings. Rather than trying to define what we understand as a collection or understanding selection criteria, what is proposed here is a collaborative reading (and writing) model of it. In this sense, this exercise responds to the need to create criteria that, more than defining a profile, allow flexible rules to be drawn up to approach the works. To avoid an institutional or academic reading, we took on the task of proposing an open scheme that would make it possible to add collaborations. Taken together, the efforts gathered here show the potential for combinations intrinsic to the ESPAC acquis.

In order for a collection to be constantly renewed, its growth and consolidation must be understood as an updating tool that, by enhancing the combinatory possibilities, also significantly expands the historical and aesthetic narratives of each of the pieces that make it up. Thinking of a publication related to the collection after four years of continuous programming, implied an exercise in reflection, not only regarding how to approach a specific collection, but also to devise a dynamic that would reflect the collaborative spirit and the generosity with which the ESPAC team has operated and decanted an institutional personality.

Instead of making a “conventional” catalog –with historical texts or a selection of works focused on a specific period or problem–, this publication proposes a collective and playful exercise that generates numerous readings and approaches to the works in the collection. At ESPAC we have wondered what writing about art can be like beyond academic papers, curatorial proposals and historical texts in an art catalogue. So, in the same way as in other of our editorial projects, Enunciados seeks to promote different forms of reading and writing.

Based on the proposal conceived by Willy Kautz, the ESPAC team collaboratively carried out both the random arrangement of the pieces selected for this exercise, as well as a list of guests to collaborate on it; among others: artists, curators, cultural managers, filmmakers, actors, educators, historians, writers, designers and publishers. The only premise was that they all had to respond to four pieces from the collection with a statement –as if they formed a kind of sentence together–, as well as with a short text or a visual response. Among the collaborations are essays, fictions, poems, drawings, graphs, photographs and even memes, also organized randomly. The impetus of this project adds to a period of renewal at ESPAC, in which we bet on various ways of meeting art beyond the exhibition space. We hope that the meeting with the pieces that make up the collection that ESPAC protects and the readings proposed in each collaboration serve as an invitation to join this project.

Ultimately, we want the publication not only to present a selection and reading of pieces from a collection –susceptible to be analyzed and interpreted from different professional fields, such as history, anthropology or curatorial–, but a whole repertoire and catalog of possibilities for to approach art and, in general, the field of the visual.