Juana Dolores Romero: "I am in favor of hate speech"

BarcelonaLa Virreina hosts from this Saturday until November 1st a strange couple formed by the playwright and actress Juana Dolores Romero and the artist Frederic Amat. She presents her first exhibition, Declaration of Love to Lenin, and he Eight, an anthology of his collaborations with great authors. The curator of both is Valentín Roma, the center's director until a few weeks ago when he was elected as the new director of Macba. That's why the presentation was a recital of emotions, with some of Roma's colleagues at La Virreina thanking him for ten fantastic years of work. Frederic Amat has added poetry: he assures that if Roma were an animal, he would be a dog, because he has "an eye, a nose, and a fang." And Juana Dolores thanked him for allowing her to work under unprecedented conditions. "I am not used to sharing a class with the directors who program me in festivals or theaters and I think it has become very clear here that, when a class is shared, one works from another place, and with another trust," said Romero. "Insolence is no longer in the popular classes. Fascism is insolent, and perhaps what we should do is recover the popular use of insolence," Roma asked.

Regarding Declaration of Love to Lenin, Romero states that it is a reflection on the "concept of love". "But to love, you must know how to hate – warns Romero–. Therefore, this project is still a defense of class hatred. I do, I am in favor of hate speech. I completely agree with hate speech. Because one, to love, must know what it is to hate. Therefore, when one speaks of class hatred, one speaks of resentment, one speaks of rancor and one speaks of expressing it with insolence".

The protagonist of the exhibition is a video in which Romero smashes miniature vehicles of the Mossos d'Esquadra and the Guàrdia Urbana with hammers. He also eats a cake with a portrait of Karl Marx with his hands and destroys the heads of a string of porcelain dolls, the remains of which he uses to mark an in crescendo of the moment Romero masturbates himself with a clitoral suction device, staring intently at the audience from the screen. Romero recites his love letter to Lenin in off, in an image where he wears a pink balaclava and dances with his chest exposed in a staging reminiscent of terrorists.

"A declaration of love for Lenin is a threat," Romero says in the video. "I declare myself to Lenin out of rebellion. I declare myself to Lenin out of flirtation. Nothing causes more terror than a historically determined, proletarian, and feminine communist woman, ready like all pretty women who feel foolish and crazy. They are terrifying. And a declaration of love for Lenin should cause terror, it should be frightening. Anything else is posturing or socialist realism as an indicator of male nostalgia, totally harmless and unattractive [...] The heterosexual cis white middle-class man, in the process or not of proletarianization, knows nothing, is ignorant. If he is handsome, he knows even less. If he is ugly, he knows a little more. But they are all wrong. They are weak or despotic, and neither weakness nor despotism are signs of intelligence. If he is a communist, the man is more handsome and less ugly, he knows more, he knows a little more, but he also hesitates for nothing or commands everything," he says.

On the other hand, "what place does love hold in proletarian ideology?", Romero asks. "Without a doubt, a remote place in the face of the sentimental arguments made by bourgeois women. We love in a different way. That's why we hate them. They possess nothing that generates the slightest envy in us, only great contempt", he states. In another passage, he denounces male violence, speaking of it as a symptom of capitalist excesses: "A woman is kidnapped, raped, suffocated, dismembered – says Romero. Her blood, down a bathtub drain. They try to burn her hair and nails, they don't have time. They throw her arms and legs in a landfill and hide her head and torso in an empty lot. The only passionate crime that can be committed is the one committed against the bourgeois State. The rest, capitalist barbarism. For love, one kills whom one must kill. Hatred protects from pride, resentment allows for the exaggeration with which the enemy is attacked. This is how I grew up, in streets with the asphalt always under construction. I prefer feminine hubris: Lenin is mine".

Great reference authors and friends

The eight to which the title of Frederic Amat's exhibition refers is also a reference to the symbol of infinity. The list of authors he has collaborated with over the years is exceptional. Thus, the exhibition includes drawings, prints, photographs, posters, and books made from works by J.V. Foix, Mark Strand, Octavio Paz, Juan Benet, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Juan Goytisolo, and Chantal Maillard. Of the latter, La Virreina has produced the film Al filo. "This is an exhibition about friendship and the ability to translate the dialogue between poetry and image. When you have a constellation of reference writers, this makes them become interlocutors, and above all friends," says Amat.

Among the works exhibited are the first English edition of És quan dormo que hi veig clar, by J.V. Foix, illustrated by Amat; three artist's books with Strand, Ferlinghetti and Benet; 53 pieces from the model of the film El Aullido,, made in collaboration with Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and a drawing of the scenography and costume elements from Memorias de una tortuga, by Juan Goytisolo. On the other hand, for Amat, when reality "sabotages dreams" or "crushes poetry or other ways of living", art can be "curative, a comfort and an alternative". "A crack to escape the abuse and ignominy that the world is currently experiencing", he warns.