Barcelona Metropolis

Anyone who is close to her will tell you that watching her create is a work of art in itself, whether it is a floral installation, a large canvas or a performance for her video art experiments. Her studio is the scene of thousands of creative battles, where paint flows like water and scaffolding is as indispensable as brushes or cameras. This swarthy woman, with her long, unruly hair, dressed almost always in black and barefoot, is Lita Cabellut, a mercurial artist who has used transgression and the overstepping of bounds to create her own unique style that blends fresco with photography to reveal interior worlds that transcend express reality, along with the contradictions of our times and the scars left by life, because Lita Cabellut’s biography runs the gamut of extreme emotions, from pain and humiliation to ecstasy.

I have always wondered what an artist’s duty is and I have always thought, or at least this the burden that I have always placed on myself, that artists must show what is going on around us. We are the loudspeakers for what is happening and we are fed by our surroundings. Artists don’t go off on tangents, they aren’t out of the box, artists are in the box, otherwise we would lose touch with the universal matrix of the collective, what is real.

I don’t think of pain, or happiness, or comfort or discomfort. I try not to judge the state of mind. I just reflect it. What I am showing there is something that we can no longer change. It would be fantasy to think that this suffering woman will be freed, that this overbearing man will have a change of heart. Life is a powerful dictator. Within that dictatorship, we need to find a way to bear the burdens and setbacks in a positive way. Sometimes we have to accept things so that we can change them from deep, very deep inside.

Yes, all of it, I have poured all of it. My own experience has been to suffer and win, victory and defeat, pride and humiliation. I know all that and I need all that for my work, and I can say that I like it all, because without one, you can’t have the other. I couldn’t feel so proud now of the things that I create, that I believe, as a person, that I have achieved, without having first understood or felt the pain of humiliation. I’m not saying that you can only learn through punishment, the punishment and humiliation aren’t necessary, the pain isn’t necessary, but thinking that we can do without it is a fantasy, because life doesn’t just give us a palette with a single range of colours. It gives us a highly varied palette.

I always say that a street kid suffers much less than the people who observe them. Much less. Because street kids are not concerned about what they should have but don’t, about the rights that are denied them, about what they haven’t got or can’t have. They are concerned about surviving, about enjoying themselves, about finding some way to get through the day without too many disasters or beatings, and if possible, with a full belly. Those runny noses that shock us, or those bare feet, they don’t bother us street kids. They are part of our natural state. I still prefer to go without shoes. I like to walk barefoot, it is much more comfortable. But when we look at those kids, our conditioned empathy keeps us from accepting that really bad times also have their soft, positive side …

Yes, and street kids are also really mutually supportive and we learn to win. If we achieve something one day, we are heroes and that sense of being a hero is a huge gift that helps to have a more daring, assured and lively character.

At the moment when someone else’s ethics turned their glance on me. It was thanks to a Catalan family who adopted me, a brave woman who, at the age of fifty-six, decided to help turn my future in a different direction. I owe her and I am grateful to her for all the chances for development that I have had in my life, and to my two (adoptive) sisters, who made room for a very rebellious and restless girl.

There was a great deal of tenderness and goodwill. But I won’t go into detail because this family is a very private thing for me. I don’t want to share it with the world. There are things that we have to wrap up in gold foil, and this is one.

My (adoptive) mother took to the Prado Museum, and holding her hand I came face to face with the greatest thing, the thing that has had the hugest impact on my life: the spirit of art. She took my reaction very seriously, I told her that I wanted to learn to paint, and that was how I started.

Everyone who has moved me or who has had some sort of positive impact on me, I don’t just remember them, I make an effort to go on remembering them. On the other hand, with anyone who has hurt me and everything that I have disliked, I also make an effort, but to forget them. Because they are of no worth to me.

Yes, that’s true, but it is an attitude that you have to work at, don’t you think? In order to heal yourself, to take care of yourself, to be respected and loved, you have to work at it, you have to make an effort to forget, to forgive, to understand, and even if you don’t understand, you still have to try to forget.

What worries me is that every fifty years we repeat the same story, the same mistakes. Our mentality is slow to evolve, and the solutions to our problems are also slow in arriving.

Terribly, terribly so. But, with his comments, he is not just offending, mistreating and discriminating against gypsies, he is offending and mistreating everyone. When someone speaks that away about a human group, I see it as an act of violence against humanity in general. If he were to make such remarks about Swedes or Finns, it would hurt me just as much. It is unacceptable for a minister to spread racism and radicalism that way. He should be thrown in jail for doing so.

Because our foundation, the thing that should be guiding us, namely ethics, is faltering. We need leaders who are spiritual, intelligent and wise, to remind us how important it is to be good people. But that is hard to achieve, because capitalism has devoured so many of the values that we thought were sacred, that would always be there. Values are like a tree, that if it doesn’t receive any light or sustenance, it will die. Now it is ethics that are dying.

Because capitalism is the same as the old feudal lords, those warlords who led the way, dragging the people along with them, ready to fight to the death for causes that were in fact nothing more than personal or family interests. A position, a title, a county that had to be defended. That is what capitalism is today, and it can be so arrogant, so cold and so pitiless as to wipe out everything that matters to us. But this has nothing to do with people who have money. There are many people with a lot of money who don’t behave like capitalists.

It’s not just what I believe, it’s what I see. I’m surrounded by young people and I see more and more that our standards are of no use to them. Everything in our culture that has some value, financial success, for example, is now of no use to them. And I see in them the seed of hope. The seed is that youth that is realising that everything that we have built, everything that we have stored up with such avidity and that is now strangling us and leaving us with no room to manoeuvre, none of this is of any use to them. This new generation is now shaking up our living space. And this is a very good thing.

When you question what the past, present and future are, an artist has to rise above all that, they have to try to reach a space where time doesn’t exist.

Well, it was the same, with Frida it was just like with Camarón. My assistants would tell me “Lita, you’ve got to stop, you’ve got to leave Frida aside.” But I couldn’t leave her aside, I couldn’t finish the series, it was beyond me, I had become her absolute slave. I admired her so much, I was so desperate to merge with her, she seemed to me so extremely brave … And not just because she was a woman who knew how to bear the pain, who could transform sharpness into beauty, pain into peace. No. It was also because of her bravery in attempting to change the Latin man and help him to perceive, to understand and to love women in a different way.

Disoriented. Strong as ever. Some shy, others aggressive. Amorous. Necessary … And clinging.

Yes, because that’s how they are, they cling, with the same tendencies, the same frustrations. Men, like women, need to change, to free themselves from al the cheap sentimentality. Just look at young people, boys and girls, how free they are. They have no prejudices. The people of my generation, on the other hand, drag around a heavy baggage of prejudice.

Yes, of course, because femininity is intelligent, it is human. Women are more patient and we think more of others because of the simple fact that we mothers. We are built to feel the pain and needs of others. Men find it difficult to develop that sort of sensitivity.

I have been on my own for a long time. And when someone asks me “Haven’t you got a partner? Do you prefer living alone?” I answer “Look, would you ask someone who lives with a partner how is it that they are living with someone else and whether they prefer living as part of a couple?” Living alone is an option. If it means you can have more time for your passions, or it’s because you haven’t found the ideal partner who will respect all those things that make you happy, or for any other reason, it is a very easy option. Nowadays women don’t need men financially, we have become very independent, and that is a very good thing. We can decide, and if we have a partner, we do it of our own free will, not out of financial necessity.

Yes, I like it very much, I try to go three or four times a year. Barcelona is my childhood, it’s me, it’s the city where I don’t get lost, I know all its nooks and crannies, its light, its smell. It is something that you have suckled at your mother’s breast and you carry it with you in your genes. I can be at ease in any city, but I feel at home in Barcelona.

I came here to study, and then I had my children here. Sometimes life will keep you in places that you would never have imagined, and by the same token sometimes it drives you out, you never know beforehand. I might end up living in Barcelona. Or in the Ampurdán, which is a marvellous place.

I don’t believe that major success exists. In that regard, I am either too ignorant or too realistic. For me, major success is my day-to-day life at home, in the studio, when I achieve something. You can’t imagine what it means to me to succeed in creating something that I have been after. If you were to tell me right then that my car was on fire, I would answer that I didn’t care. When you attain such success, several times a year, several times a month, the fact of having money, or being popular, of having your work in this or that museum, dwindles to almost nothing. My big success is still to come, and maybe it won’t happen until I am in my eighties, if I am lucky and I have painted a lot and I achieve something worthy of the name. But for the time being, my major success consists of being alive, of having survived a very difficult childhood, in being a mother, in loving my children madly and having been able to respect them and be respected by them. That is what I consider major success.