Unfortunately, many words about love are like this. From Greek mythology to contemporary cinema and music, our cultural references tend to associate desire, passion, or love with a long chain of humiliation, revenge, and death. The words of love are also just as dark. Words of love that Núria Güell brought to the TNC in April 2024 and which can now be seen at the Tecla Sala in video format. Nine stories that start from the notions of love that the artist has previously sought in prisons: romantic love (from victim to executioner), love of war or weapons, love of God, of freedom, of social revolution, of one's homeland, of one's people and of one's father. Nine stories written and read without filters or censorship by their protagonists, seven of whom have been sentenced to between 4 and 2,111 years in prison for gender violence, belonging to a terrorist or anti-fascist organization, possession of weapons and explosives, armed robbery, moral attack, homicide. Two exceptions are the survivor of an abusive relationship and the sniper, who has been paid and decorated. Güell accompanies him with a series of songs that, in the name of love, speak of madness, addiction, possession and annulment... Remember what "Loves that kill never die"?
That love is associated with death is nothing new. That we begin to question it to change the narrative, yes. Writers like bell hooks, Eva Illouz and Mona Chollet have pointed out that these thousand-year-old representations have consequences for the real Christ but that a social and cultural commitment is necessary. the root of the problem, opening their Instagram account to anyone who wanted to share their case of violence. The content, but also the huge number of atrocities that are committed day after day and justified "out of love", is alarming. that they are not unfortunate isolated acts at the hands of monsters, but that we have it so ingrained that we have normalized it. The words are missing, but there are too many voices to continue remaining silent. What responsibility does culture have? asks Güell. We need more songs, with choruses that make us integrate other notions of love; More comics, like those of Liv Strömquist and Sophie Lambda, that use humor to distance themselves and gain self-criticism; and many, many more films. Fly, the series that exposes the psychological abuse that permeates, without blows, to the point of undermining the present and future of our relationships, should be required viewing in every high school in this country.
Any gesture without discourse, no matter how minuscule, can end up organizing a thought, a social discourse. Many ways of acting end up being collective ways of thinking that repeat, amplify, and perfect that initial gesture. When we move from romance to reality and what we thought was a plot twist becomes a real, regular, and common occurrence, we discover the structural foundations that underpin both sexist violence and the malaise of culture.
