Words of love. An essay on passions, with Núria Güell
The list of Western cultural representations around love and passions would be endless: from Greek mythology and its tragedies, through scholastic Christianity, courtly love, the Golden Age, the Romanticism of the 18th and part of the 19th centuries, to the most popular or alternative cultural expressions of our time, there are witnesses to the damage caused by some idea of love.
In the realm of reality, we continue to suffer because of believers who exterminate others in the name of love for a God; from all the nationalists who continue to throw themselves into mutual destruction for love of some homeland or nation; 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 the love of some idea of social revolution; or the lover who decides to kill his beloved (or vice versa) upon realizing that he is losing his love.
What is the responsibility of culture in all these paradoxes? How many dramatically pre-established situations have we experienced in our love stories? What pleasures or ghosts 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 blindly passionate love? What effects would the de-idealization of love have on the social order? And on us?
This video essay was 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 Equipment of Catalonia -among which is the Bòlit-, the Santa Mònica, the Department of Culture of the Generalitat of Catalonia and the LOOP Festival.
