Years of criticism and personal attacks have left artist and writer Juana Dolores questioning whether to continue creating in Catalan, she said, following remarks about class, identity and language. In a video posted on Instagram, she said most of her work is in Catalan, but the climate around the controversy has made her reconsider. She is weighing that decision; she has not announced that she has stopped creating in the language.
Born in El Prat de Llobregat, Dolores became a focus of debate after comments at the opening of her exhibition, “Juana Dolores Romero Casanova, la exposición que ha comisariado en La Virreina.” In a televised interview with 3Cat, she described “hate” as a tool for revolution and referred to her participation in the October 2019 unrest in Barcelona’s Urquinaona square. She argued that class resentment helped shape the protests, alongside the independence movement.
Her remarks drew criticism, particularly from some supporters of Catalan independence. In her video, Dolores said she had faced years of online harassment and accused some nationalist groups of using her words to advance their own agendas. She also rejected the claim that she had characterized Catalan as a bourgeois language, arguing that working-class organizing, including the participation of Spanish-speaking migrants, had been basic to cultural life in Catalonia.
Dolores has defended linguistic immersion in public schools, saying working-class families supported the policy, many of them migrants from other parts of Spain. Her position is part of a long-running dispute over the place of Catalan and Spanish in education. Catalonia’s Statute of Autonomy identifies Catalan as the region’s own language, while the 2009 Catalan Education Act establishes it as the school system’s vehicular language.
The legal debate intensified after a June 2021 ruling by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia required at least 25% of classroom instruction in Spanish in a school case. In 2022, the Catalan Parliament validated legislation intended to preserve Catalan as the principal vehicular language while allowing language plans to reflect school-level circumstances. The dispute has continued to divide political parties: the Catalan government has defended its authority over the school model, while Partido Popular leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has promoted a “cordial bilingualism” approach associated with a larger share of Spanish-language instruction.
Amid the controversy, Dolores has emphasized the precariousness of her position as an artist, describing her work as niche and unlikely to reach a mass audience. She has called for greater support and understanding, warning that continued hostility could lead her to abandon Catalan as her primary language of creation. Her exhibition “Declaración de amor a Lenin” at La Virreina explores love’s revolutionary and dissident potential as a political category, challenging its traditional association with bourgeois sentimentality.
The debate around Dolores’s remarks comes amid wider tensions over language and identity, as well as social conditions in Catalonia. A recent analysis of Catalonia’s social services sector pointed to underfunding and low wages as factors contributing to broader pressures. The issues intersect in a region where arguments about public education and migration also shape debate over Catalan’s future.
Dolores, 34, has launched her first major museum exhibition. Her case highlights the challenges facing artists who work in languages spoken alongside a larger national language, and competing ideas about cultural identity in Spain. The decision she is considering concerns her own artistic practice, while the debate around it reflects wider disputes over Catalan’s place in contemporary cultural life, alongside questions of migration and public education.
