The kintsukuroi (Japanese: gold repair) is an ancient ceramic technique of Japanese origin, used to fix ceramic fractures by applying resin varnish sprinkled or mixed with gold, silver, or platinum powder, so that once repaired, the object’s fractures remain visible and highlighted – in gold –, making each object unique. Kintsukuroi is part of a philosophy that suggests that breaks and repairs not only form part of an object’s history and should be displayed rather than hidden, but also make the object valuable. The fractures reveal the object’s experience, its transformation, and its history.
Mura’s work, structured, clear, strong yet sensitive, looks straight ahead. It shows traces of pain but also of courage. The courage of a body that, by showing its scars, reveals both the inflicted wound and the healing and transformation. No body remains the same after battle, no being walks the same after a fracture. The body transforms, the way of walking changes too. And thought, and the relationship with others. Facing the victim, Mura speaks of the survivor; facing fragility, Mura speaks of courage, strength, and the resilience of living. She speaks of wise and beautiful beings who understand pain and wounds. Of the genealogy of survival, of the wisdom of shipwreck. Beings who show their wounds because they know, like the sibyls, how to foresee the future.
In a way, Mura’s aesthetics is Antigonian. Antigone rebels against Creon, who embodies the Law of the Father, which separates and hierarchizes, risking her life for the law itself, the law of the mother, the law of the flesh. She buries the dead, her dead, against the law that forbids it: “la morte vuole una legge uguale per tutti.” And in that act, Antigone finds beauty: ethics as aesthetics, “E poi, sarà bello anche il morire.” In Mura’s work, beauty is synonymous with moral integrity and looks us in the eyes.
All of Mura’s works challenge us. Her gaze invites hundreds of female gazes to confront those who dare to look at them. We are not used to women’s direct gaze. Art history has accustomed us to oblique glances, submissive female eyes, representations made to obey the law of the father, compared to the powerful gaze of male body representations. The defiant female gaze has been linked to figures to be feared: Lilith, Salome… women who do not follow the canon, who do not conform, who react and recognize themselves. Mura looks at us, with the women of her family genealogy, with the women she invites to intervene in her works, to reopen a conscious gaze on reality and others, stepping into public space and challenging it. Her gaze, like a mirror before social wickedness, judges. Like Antigone, like Medusa, like the Sphinx.
The cracks of pain are present. Antigone was buried alive as an example for the following generations of women. Mura has rescued Antigone. Gently, she has cleaned her body, repaired her wounds, which now shine like trails of kintsukuroi, offering us a sign along the way.