Exhibitions
Núria Güell: words of love
Tecla Sala shows the winning project in the 10th edition of the Video Creation Award.
Love has been an inexhaustible source of stories, clichés and cultural misunderstandings. In fact, if someone were to ask where the idea that loving involves suffering, sacrificing oneself or losing one's mind comes from, we would probably have to review our collective cultural baggage. This is precisely the line that Núria Güell explores in Words of Love. An essay on passions, a video installation that focuses on how we have learned to love and what lies behind the rhetoric of love that we have been carrying around for centuries.
The project, which can be seen at the Tecla Sala Art Center from today until June 22, is the winning proposal of the 10th edition of the Video Creation Award , a co-production between the Territorial Centers of the Public System of Visual Arts Facilities of Catalonia, the Arts Santa Mònica center, LOOP Barcelona and the Department of Culture of the Generalitat.
In this work, the artist shakes up ideas that are often taken for granted: what does it mean to care?, what does the discourse of "everything for love" hide?, why do so many institutional discourses, including artistic ones, insist on putting love and affection at the center as if it were a universal solution? Through an essayistic and visual approach, Güell points to the contradictions between what is supposed to be about loving and the consequences, in body and mind, of assuming these guidelines as unquestionable truths.
The video installation proposes a critical look at the images and discourses that have shaped our idea of love, from Greek tragedies to today's advertisements. Love as a passion has justified wars, sacrifices, murders and alienations of all kinds. And yet, we continue to defend it as if it were the noblest value. The piece questions whether the root of many social conflicts is not hatred but a distorted form of love that does not tolerate the desire of the other, nor autonomy, nor loss.
From this perspective, the work invites us to think about whether we should completely rethink what it means to love and how this idea has been constructed, socially and culturally. At the same time, it puts on the table that the language with which we speak of love is not neutral, and that love is also an ideological product, with all that this implies. Far from proposing recipes, Paraules d'amor opens spaces of doubt and suspicion, precisely where traditionally certainty and devotion have been sought to be imposed.
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