The artist Juana Dolores has posted a video on her Instagram account to warn that she is considering stopping creating in Catalan. “I have a job, I write. 90% of my work is written in Catalan. I hope the situation changes, but I am about to stop doing it.” The statements of the poet and playwright born in El Prat de Llobregat come after the controversy generated by some statements she made to the 3Cat news about Declaration of love to Lenin. Juana Dolores Romero Casanova, the exhibition she curated at La Virreina. There she said that “hatred is the tool to carry out the revolution” and, recalling her participation in the October 2019 riots, stated: “In Urquinaona, which we all like very much, there was a lot of hatred. Many call me Spanish, but the one who was in Urquinaona burning containers was me, not Pilar Rahola, along with 16-year-olds from Zona Franca. That was not just about independence, it was about class hatred. And we all loved it.”
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According to the artist in her video, those statements have sparked a smear campaign. “I am tired of suffering lynchings for years by the Catalan indepes who are nothing but bitter, whiners and racists. Why am I making this video? There are people who take advantage of me to scrape together a few followers even if they pose as activists. I am accused of having said things I have not said. A youth organization that presents itself as nationalist and left-wing where migration in Catalonia is criminalized and blamed for the language situation in Catalonia,” she has defended.
In the clip, Dolores assures: “I have never said that the Catalan language is the language of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie does not own anything. All the beautiful things of this land are perpetuated thanks to the sweat of the organized working class.” And she has defended linguistic immersion: “Public school and linguistic immersion were defended by the struggle of the organized working class. The vast majority of them Spanish-speaking migrants,” she recalled.
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“If you want me to keep Catalan, take care of me a little. I am an artist who pays rent with her work and artistic practice which is already minority and elitist. There are few opportunities to have a great public impact. My work is very niche and has no possibility of appealing to the masses. I am aware and fortunate because I can pay rent with what I do, the day I write a novel things will change,” she warned.
The 34-year-old artist has just presented her first exhibition in a museum. Declaration of love to Lenin, available until November 1 at La Virreina, claims “the revolutionary and dissident potential of love, a political category that cultural history associated with bourgeois sentimentalism and that today lives a new confinement from the imaginaries sponsored by the urban middle classes.”
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