Juan Tallón reconstructs the mysterious disappearance of a 38-tonne sculpture from the Reina Sofía Museum

This begins in 1987, but blows up in January 2006. What begins is the relationship between the Reina Sofía Museum and the North American sculptor Richard Serra, from whom the institution acquires a 38-tonne steel sculpture (

) for 450,000 marks

. What jumps through the air is the disappearance of that same piece, misplaced, volatilized, abandoned in a warehouse on the outskirts of Madrid. Natividad Pulido (

journalist ) launches the news and is the cultural fervor of the year, of the decade, of the start of the century.

The story is fascinating. A mystery that participates in the supernatural (to say it with Borges). Also from laziness. And, hurrying, of the bufo. That accidental anomaly was embedded as an obsession in the frontal cortex of the writer Juan Tallón (Vilardevós, Orense, 1975) who spent 10 years recreating the novel that was in this matter. A real story. A novel that Tallón did not write, but he enjoyed thinking about how it could be. Until it was released. And here it is.

and solved like a good puzzle that does not alter what happened, but smears it with even more astonishment. It is titled

and is published by Anagrama.

"In 2009 I visited the Reina Sofía Museum with the Argentine writer César Aira to see a retrospective of Juan Muñoz. That day was important. After strolling among Muñoz's human-shaped sculptures, we went to see the replica of Serra's work, in room 102, and that's where it all started", explains Tallón. "

. How it was conceived, how it was built, how it disappeared, how it was searched for and how it was replicated. It seemed impossible not to write it after spending a decade obsessed and repeating what himself: 'What a story'".

He applied himself as a full-length supported writer in journalism.

He rescued information, chronicles, reports, articles, the summary of the case, voices of protagonists involved and others frightened by the disaster.

From there he extracted narrative lines to give structure to

, an artifact made up of 72 voices spread over 78 chapters.

All around a crazy event and strung together with sagacity.

All converted into a literary pyre that maintains the mystery, even hope, until the end.

The hope that the piece would appear.

But it is not known what happened.

If it was buried, melted down or sold... The last person who saw it, the manager of the company in charge of preserving it, Jesús Macarrón, died a few years ago and

. "This novel is the exercise of exhausting an event. And its strength is in the structure. What happens, the disintegration of Serra's work, is told on a newspaper page, but the mystery is what matters," says Tallón. .

Artists, police commissioners, court clerks, museum directors, gallery owners, a lawyer from the Court of Auditors, sworn security guards, security experts, taxi drivers, deputies, an Interpol agent,

... Each one with their song, with their hypothesis.

"They are all complementary voices even though they are so different from each other," says the author.

Real beings with whom he spoke.

The injured sculptor, Richard Serra, also has a place.

"But from him I extracted the testimonies of dozens of interviews. That's how I made his voice."

The novel is an art treatise, a mystery plot and a splendid critique of the arthritic Spanish bureaucracy.

“It is important to point out how this one, being blind, can destroy everything: people and institutions.

The person in charge of guarding the work of Richard Serra, for example, was a victim of bureaucracy.

, which caused (among other issues) the company to bury itself in debt and from there to bankruptcy, "explains Tallón.

"And from there, of course, the disappearance of 38 tons of steel, which vanished like a teaspoon."

It also reconstructs in

the Spanish artistic fabric from the 80s to the 2000s.

The Reina Sofía Museum overcame this crisis.

There were no guilty.

and life went on that way.

That's in the novel, of course.

But there is something even more exciting and that is that this adventure has no end goal.

What happened happened.

"But it is difficult to avoid the fantasy that the work appears," says Tallón.

Thus it crosses from fiction to non-fiction.

That is the novel.

"My effort has been to manage the enigma and the anxiety in a book of real events where perhaps not all of them happened."

- And if the work appears?

- That can not be.

No longer.

Furthermore, when a mystery ceases to be a mystery, it is reduced to a sad event.

.

And the Reina Sofía, less than anyone.

Conforms to The Trust Project criteria

Know more

• Reina Sofia Museum

• Bilbao

• Court of Auditors

• art

• literature

• Guggenheim Bilbao

• culture

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