“Paraules d’amor” by Núria Güell. Winner of the 2023 Video Creation Award

‘Words of Love’

From 15/11/2024 to 15/12/2024

The list of Western cultural representations surrounding love and passions would be endless: from Greek mythology and its tragedies, through Christian scholasticism, courtly love, the Golden Age, and the romanticism of the 18th century and part of the 19th, to the most popular or alternative cultural expressions of our time, there has been testimony of the ravages caused by some idea of love.

In the realm of the real, we continue to suffer from believers who exterminate the other in the name of love for a God; all the nationalists who continue to throw themselves into mutual destruction for love of some homeland or motherland; adolescents who interpret jealous traits as signs of true love; the mother who kills her children so that they do not suffer; revolutionaries who give their lives or take them for love of some idea of social revolution; or the lover who decides to kill their beloved (or vice versa) upon realizing they are losing their love.

What is the responsibility of culture in all these paradoxes? How many dramatically pre-established situations have we lived in our love stories? What pleasures or phantoms are hidden behind the mask of beliefs surrounding the ideal of love? Could it be that the main cause of social conflicts is not hatred but an excess of blind love? What effects would the de-idealization of love have on social order? And on us?

In the exhibition Words of Love, Núria Güell, through an inaugural action, a video projection, and a closing party with live music, questions the established representations and learned cultural mandates surrounding passionate love and its consequences.