In June 2023, researcher and writer Ariel Florencia Richards travelled to Montreal in search of the archive of architect Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978). At the Canadian Centre for Architecture, she found the papers, photographs, and letters that make up and construct the intimacy of his creative and emotional practice, as well as the regrets, desires, and quests, not only his own but also those of the people who accompanied him and were transformed by him throughout his life.
At the beginning of 2025, Richards published Gordon Matta-Clark. Against Old Surfaces under the Metales Pesados publishing house. In this narrative and speculative essay, the author presents us a narrator who observes a writer, who in her diary describes the experience of her research, and the stories that run through the New York architect’s personal archives. She is transformed through the archives, and in her Diary, this metamorphosis is confirmed.
Short-Term Eternity is a further extension of Gordon Matta-Clark’s archive and of the diaries Ariel Florencia Richards kept during her time in Montreal. In the words of Javier Guerrero, “to culminate” would be to die. An archive that doesn’t culminate produces another one after it, and will be other hands and pens who continue this dialogue. This metabolic approach to the archive allows us to imagine other kinds of associations, where a file on a shelf becomes a possibility, a reading table becomes a writing space, and an image becomes a voice.
On the eve of his death, Gordon Matta-Clark murmured that in life you have to write a novel. This one is his too.
