Núria Güell: “I want to look what is real in the face” Haven’t you seen the MACBA Collection exhibition yet?
‘At the time (2008), the only option Cubans had to leave the country legally was to make a tourist man or woman fall in love with them and marry him or her. Love had become a kind of passport to freedom – or to the illusion of freedom. (...) My plan was to follow the same pattern. I would marry a Cuban man; I would give him the means to obtain the coveted papers and permits to leave the country in exchange for being able to use him as a work of art. I would use love to fool Cuban and Spanish bureaucracy. This is how the Humanitarian Aid project was born. With that in mind, I organised a kind of public competition in which I offered to marry the Cuban man who wrote me “the most beautiful love letter in the world” […] A jury made up of three Cuban prostitutes would pick the winning letter. [...] Once he acquired Spanish nationality, we would divorce in accordance with the agreed terms and conditions. In the event of the work being sold, the profits would be divided equally.’ Núria Güell, from the Humanitarian Aid project.
You can listen to Güell’s own statements in an interview with Radio Web MACBA:
