Carlos Fonseca on Art, Literature, and the Future

Carlos Fonseca, a Costa Rican-born writer (1987) raised in Puerto Rico and the US, a Princeton graduate now living in London and teaching at Cambridge's Trinity College, was named by Granta among the best young Spanish-language authors under 40. In an interview, he discusses the interplay between art and literature: his novel 'Museo animale' was inspired by the 2011 'Savage Beauty' exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum dedicated to Alexander McQueen, exploring fashion as a boundary between natural and cultural, animal and human. For his new novel 'Austral', he looked to Land Art by Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria, and Nancy Holt to conceive an ecological novel. He admires artists like Francis Alÿs and Argentine media artists Escari, Costa, and Jacoby. Fonseca emphasizes atmosphere over plot, citing W.G. Sebald and Faulkner. He believes that engaging with past injustices is key to imagining new futures, moving beyond apocalyptic visions. He advises young writers to be free, ambitious, and willing to risk poetic intuition. He sees art as a 'profane illumination' (Walter Benjamin) offering direction in a post-truth era. He is reconsidering his earlier fascination with ruins (inspired by Joseph M. Gandy's 1798 painting of the Bank of England in ruins) and now looks to Cuban artists Wifredo Lam and Ana Mendieta for a way out of catastrophe.