TEXTS

In the paradigm of conceptual art, performance shares its austerity with other mediums of representation. In the event that, beyond the body and its expressiveness in space-time, some material element is used, selection is crucial: in the best performances the object is simple, modest and of common use. Its pregnance, on the other hand, roots us to a specific place and time; and at the same time, triggers our imagination from the concrete to the universal. Like a magical talisman, capable of making local and conceptual coordinates coincide.

This is what happens in Monica Mura’s piece The Soap Wall with Aleppo soap. Whether in the form of a block, or in its simple unit as a bar manipulated by the artist, it connects us with that and other wars that we forget at the dictation of the media agenda. And at the same time, with each personal, social and human situation that would require our commitment and not “washing our hands” with indifference.

And yet, washing our hands is a gesture that we also need to do when our care is required, before healing or cooking… we need to wash our hands to start a new page. And restart hope.

The importance of genealogy as a discipline is something that we feminists know deeply, since it is the tool that connects us with everything that has been done before us and places us historically in the present. These feminist genealogies refer to previous ones and are, in themselves, part of a necessary activism from the Academy and History.

The work of the artist Monica Mura (Cagliari, 1979) can be read from multiple prisms, but one of the main ones is precisely her commitment to the history of women. Mura is interested in the recovery of memory, as she did in the project AUSENCIA-PRESENCIA. Tu vacío es mi absence, tu memoria es mi presencia (2017) but she also works with the possibility of art to transform reality.

Thus, no less important is the active role of her works, which require the participation of the public, questioned how they look to ask them about what each of us does, individually, to end inequalities. In addition to women, other minoritized groups such as trans people, or those at risk of social exclusion have become protagonists of Mura’s work, who far from taking a privileged position and directing the gaze, “lets herself be made” to relearn about the place where she herself stands as an artist. …

Monica Mura’s artistic work is committed and involved from feminist conceptual and discursive positions, as can be seen in her artistic career and in particular in her multidisciplinary and multidimensional exhibition project E ti que (de quen) vés sendo?.

The body, the socialized signifiers that sex/gender categories imply in patriarchal societies, but also the openings and dynamisms of these categories towards a diverse, elastic plurality, transgenders, without ignoring the memory of what we have been and even mostly are today, men and women, behaviorally differentiated, in hierarchy, dependence and roles.

But also time and its passage, presences and absences, in its absolute form death, and until that moment life, full of new possibilities. And communication, the word, used for definitions, but also emotions. All of this seems to configure a wide territory in which the artist shapes her creative visual, sound, tactile discourse, bathed by a spirit and practice of expanded performance, to ask herself and ask us, to think and reflect on What are you? What are we?, Whose are you?…

The kintsukuroi (in Japanese: gold repair) is an ancient ceramic technique of Japanese origin, which is used to fix fractures in ceramics, using resin varnish dusted or mixed with gold, silver or platinum powder, in such a way that once the object is repaired, it leaves visible and highlights the traces of the fractures –in gold–, making the objects unique specimens. The Kintsukuroi is part of a philosophy that proposes that breakages and repairs are not only part of the history of an object and should be shown instead of hidden, but make the object that has them valuable. The fractures show the experience of the object, its transformation and history.

Mura’s work, structured, clear, strong yet sensitive, looks straight ahead. It shows the traces of pain, but also those of courage. The courage of a body that showing the scars, shows along with the inflicted wound, healing and transformation. No body remains the same after the battle, no being walks the same after the fracture. The body transforms, the walk too. And thought, and the relationship with others. Confronting the victim, Mura speaks of the survivor, confronting fragility, Mura speaks of courage, strength and resilience that living implies. It speaks of wise and beautiful beings who know about pain and wounds. Of the genealogy of survival, of the wisdom of the shipwreck. Beings that show their wounds because they know, like the sibyls, the future. …

Monica Mura feeds on interactions with the social from an analysis centered on traditions, culture and the channels that build history. With a deep commitment to gender that permeates identities and expands her discourse from the intimate to the common, if anything stands out in her work it is that curious condition, which questions and surprises her close context. Her languages surround the performative, translate and interrogate bodies, link to video and photography as an expanded reality that documents and sensitizes the viewer.

She auscultates the sonic, the intense and the unnoticed, and forms spaces of encounter where the installation is associated with memory and the structure of each place. In many cases, her works are articulated around the experiential as if the exchange between experiences, hers and those of the rest, gave the key to the power of empathy. Therefore, observing them often simulates being the prelude to a critical perception of the environment, especially when it affects the identity issue.

She speaks of a world that celebrates and contradicts at the same time, reflecting its inconsistencies from activism but also revealing affections. What happens with her images is braided to the pulse of life in the form of small undisciplined acts with which to delocalize the daily to find its fissures. To act like that crack that breaks the rhythm of the established and turns it diverse.

The work of the multidisciplinary artist Monica Mura is transgressive, critical, and exciting, going beyond the obvious and the immediate. We have worked together before and it has been very inspiring to accompany her path, her growth, and the way she transcends herself. The theme of the image present in her work is, without a doubt, a great challenge in contemporary society. Monica approaches the image from different perspectives: the role of women, the dictatorship of the image, aging. Guy Debord, the creator of the concept of the “society of the spectacle,” defined the spectacle as the set of social relations mediated by images. In contemporary society, there is an excessive concern with beauty and its aesthetic standards.

Many of these concerns arise only because of the role of the press, which uses advertising to instruct consumers in the compulsive use of everything related to appearance. The “dictatorship of beauty” is the most evident example of the overvaluation of the body in contemporary society. The concept of beauty becomes a collective standard, with the “label” of what it is to be beautiful, generic for everyone, but not individual as it should be treated. Every year, more ways to achieve the ideal body are invented. Silicone, botox, liposuction, and, perhaps worst of all so far, anabolic steroids, which are extremely harmful to health. …

Monica Mura starts from the body and the multiple variations with which it adopts meanings, whether in the pose, in the dress, in the way of covering the sex, or in the mirror, which also reflects the image that each one produces. Monica observes the modes of representation of the body, that material, to enter into a new rite of passage, in the construction of an open and in-process model, where the act of looking becomes endless like desire.

Monica Mura starts from the memory of herself that emerges from small family photos, of free animals, of an imaginary of longing and fabulation that she transforms into an artifact, into an object that is also the trace of her action by changing the scales and layout of the original object, such as the golden stitching on the canvas or the bustle of moving bells when crossing the unknown of a space whose limit is the notation of the exchange of the author’s face with her own.

Monica Mura makes art politically by intervening in each garment to recodify it and by exhibiting the proposal of expressive freedom. She makes art politically when she calls us to look with our skin, with our touch, with our hearing, with our own album of experiences and emotions. She does so by playing with the word and lengthening the perceptive ambiguity of the common phrase “…de quién vienes siendo?” (whose child are you?), which in our culture leads us somewhere, perhaps towards a resilient home and towards the disappearance of gender. …

Performance as a tool to transform. Citizen participation as a means to value, make visible, recover, and rescue from oblivion. Memory as a ductile material to generate new bonds. And artistic language to deconstruct the codes of patriarchy.

Monica Mura (Cagliari, 1979) always touches a sensitive nerve with her works. As aesthetic as they are profound, in them every element is a symbol, every object is a metaphor. Through an autobiographical narrative, Mura always moves us in common grounds, where individual memories become universal, where her roots mimetize with those of all the people who, in some way, ‘have contributed to her being.’ Polyhedral and versatile, the artist addresses different themes from a multidisciplinary perspective, where video, sound, photography, sculpture, installation, and drawing are presented as scenarios for reflection and interaction with the public, in a contextual dialectic with space (physical, social, and historical).

Collecting tradition, from technique to concept, becomes the protagonist in a delicate, precise, and incisive work. Mura weaves and sutures with gold threads (leitmotiv in her work, a symbol of resilience) each layer of intangible heritage, reconstructing a history where women were ignored, granting them that place that belonged (and belongs) to them by right. …

Exploring the creative universe of Monica Mura leads us to a deep reflection on identity, memory, and genders, as I was able to experience through her most recent solo exhibition “E ti que (de quen) vés sendo?” (And who [whose] are you?) at the Iglesia de la Compañía (Santiago de Compostela, 2018). The power of art as a transforming agent is always present, and the artist adopts a mediating role that turns visitors/participants into protagonists. Her work presents us with a major question. As Mura herself explains, she poses questions but not answers, which are multiple and personal.

Monica Mura’s work (Cagliari, 1979) has had an important focus on gender, feminism, and activist action from its beginnings. The first time I collaborated with Mura was in the production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, which I coordinated in 2006, when a diverse group of women presented the play for the first time in Santiago de Compostela at the Teatro Principal with the aim of breaking the silence on women’s experiences and participating in an international campaign to eliminate gender violence. Mura has proven to be an artist committed to equality and to women since this first encounter, although her artistic work has followed different paths. …