Son[i]a #380 Núria Güell
- 00:01 Listening devices
- 03:33 The institution as an artistic medium
- 06:28 The ethics of intentions and the ethics of consequences
- 08:49 My barometer: the friends I grew up with and my grandad
- 09:41 Questions have to be honest. The desire to answer that
- 10:15 Sharing a cause
- 11:46 "Too much melanin", 2013
- 13:35 "My vacations with Lume", 2021
- 17:40 Matters of class
- 25:30 Understanding the mandate of hetero masculinity.
- 28:39 "The Mum and the Whore. An Essay on Femininity", 2020-22
- 31:30 "Aphrodite", 2017. Notes on the capitalization of the discourse of care.
- 35:05 An Annex to Aphrodite (2017) for the Who Cares? festival, 2020.
- 36:15 It worries me that museums say the same thing as power
- 36:40 I see myself as part of the problem. That’s where contradictions can emerge
- 39:07 I don't understand that no project has failed. "Black on White", 2013
- 48:05 Psychoanalysis
- 49:15 Working conditions
- 51:20 The status of the artist
- 54:17 The professional artist
In Núria Güell’s (Vidreres, 1981) practice, the museum-institution becomes the actual medium of her art: she manipulates, squeezes and expands it, questions its rationale, blind spots and contradictions, and seeks to transcend its boundaries. Her works always spring from social conflicts that directly affect her, and she uses the strategies of art as platforms to dismantle the logic of power. In a gesture that aims her semantic arrows at the social reality in question and at the art institution itself, Núria Güell embarks on long-distance processes. Collaborative endeavours in which listening, conversation, legal investigation, negotiation, confrontation and connection are top-level creative tools. Hers is a disobedient practice that fills the spaces of art with stories that are usually neither seen nor heard. And it is also a political practice: a life practice, in the sense that she inserts herself into each of her projects, accepting the legal, ethical and emotional challenges that they entail.
In this podcast we talk to Núria Güell about her working methods and about the activation of artistic practices that become mechanisms for listening. We reflect on the realm of ethics and morality in art, and on disobediences, psychoanalysis, precarities, the status of the artist and the urgent need to recover the subversive potential of contemporary art.
Conversation: Loli Acebal, Txe Roimeser, Ricardo Cárdenas and Anna Ramos. Scripr: Loli Acebal. Sound production: Albert Tarrats. Voice over: Violeta Ospina.
Image: Núria Güell, "La Mamá y la Puta. Un ensayo sobre la feminidad", 2020-22. Courtesy of the artist