Visiting the creative universe of Monica Mura leads us to a deep reflection on identity, memory and genders, as I could experience it with her most recent individual exhibition Who(se) are you? in the Compañía Church. The power of Art as a transformative agent is always present and the artist adopts a mediation role that turns the visitors into protagonist participants. Her work poses us a big question mark. As Mura puts it, she poses questions but not the answers, which are multiple and personal.
The work of Monica Mura (Cagliari, 1979) has had an important approach to gender, feminism and vindicative action from the beginning. The first time I collaborated with Mura was in the production of Eve Ensler’s The Monologues of the Vagina which I coordinated in 2006, when a diverse group of women presented the work for the first time in Santiago de Compostela in the Teatro Principal aiming to break the silence on the experiences of women and participate in an international campaign to delete gender violence. Mura has proved to be a committed artist concerning equality and women from this first meeting, although her artwork has followed different paths.
Her work is based on great sensitivity and respect, creating a space where women can have voice, explain their story with words, visually and with the work of their hands as it can be seen in her project El Retrato. Abriendo la puerta a nuestro lugar más intimo (The Portrait. Opening the door to our most intimate place) (the program “Nos+Otras en Red” of Educathyssen in collaboration with the RMP of Lugo) and in Ellas Cuentan (They Count/Tell), a video montage in which she interviews women of Galicia and Sardinia, examining the bonds between women and between generations. In her recent works, Mura has decided to expand the focus of attention in order open a space of dialogue and reflection on the identity of gender and the experience of trans* people with works like Transvideo, a delegated video-performance.
The exhibition Who(se) are you? defines the artist and is practically a retrospective of a work that is in constant evolution and dialogue. Monica Mura is an interdisciplinary artist “par excellence”: she combines photography, video, performance, exploration of other techniques and materials such as glass, the use of lights, shadows and reflections, collage, technology, word and sound, both in collaborative projects and individual ones, in order to create human works of great emotional power. Beauty, not a very fashionable term at present in the artistic discourse, is undeniable in her art because it is the beauty of the authenticity and generosity of the people that share their story, the beauty of resilience. The empathic look that characterizes her as an artist and that involves us in her creations is remarkable.
Visible in some cases, invisible in others, Mura plays with her image which is very present in the whole exhibition. She explores her personal answer to the question of the title “Who(se) are you?” through multiple pieces, in which he uses the self-portrait in different formats, confirming to us that the personal is the most universal. The figure of the artist is inescapable, and literally wraps us in it when we cross her self-portrait of big cloths of veil that separate different spaces. The huge and impressive work You I I You, hangs in the central nave with the black and white photographic portraits of the artist, her mother and her father printed on cloth of veil. It is a mobile installation that allows different configurations of the four panels (4 meters of height), creating new hybrid identities. In spite of the scale of this piece, it shows the care for detail that she puts in each creation. The handmade gold needlework, the use of golden pigments on the fabric and the jingling Sardinian sheep bells are an integral part of this visual and audible mural in movement.
The threads with which we sew the past, the memories and our identities are in this case physical and metaphorical. Mura never seeks only a superficial impact, and a more careful approach to her works always rewards us with new meanings and nuances.
Your emptiness is my absence, your memory is my presence rescues the figures of the artists Maruja Mallo (Galicia) and Edina Altara (Sardegna) in a work of mixed technique accomplished with carved mirror and games of lights, reflections and shadows, that evokes these women who have long been erased or forgotten in the world of Art. Absence and presence are also a conductive thread of her artistic production: from the empty frame of the performance Before and After (presented in the XX International Biennial of Art of Cerveira, Portugal), used as an installation where the visitors can be a part of the work and portray themselves, to the play of mirrors and shadows in works like Pre(Ab)sence and Puzzles.
A sense of absence linked to uprooting permeates the works of Mura. Her personal trajectory, being native of Italy but resident in Spain for 16 years, is inseparable to her questions concerning concepts like memory, family, roots and identity. The absence/presence of Sardinia is a constant since works like Sas Diosas. Miradas, sa arèntzia mea where she investigates the roots of her maternal family (exhibited in “The space of the Memory”, Thyssen- Bornemisza Museum, 2017). The most remarkable elements of her last exhibition, the portraits of Mura’s father and mother that hang in the central nave, are at the same time a reminder of the absence caused by distance. I share a mixed identity (in my case, Irish and Spanish) with Mura and therefore, perhaps, I feel affinity with many of the feelings that she evokes. I sense that this displaced, fragmented or hybrid identity is useful to approach the experience of other people that may symbolically live “uprooted” in society due to other reasons.
More than a group of “works”, I would define her creation as an “experience”in which, as visitors, we become an integral part of it. It is an experience of sensorial immersion.
In Who(se) are you? we are welcomed by the surrounding sound of the Transoration, an audible landscape of a collective performance, in which all the words of the dictionary that begin with “trans” are recited -reaching liturgical connotations in the exhibition’s context – and we leave with the Multioration. The words combine with the visual and the audible in this and other works such as Red Words Golden Words or No More Dyed Bedsheets (Day Against Gender Violence 25N, Ribadavia) and offers us a reflection on language and its power to create new realities. Power to See To See Power, is an innovative audiovisual work in which Mura uses her self-portrait once again and plays with pixelated images and video game sounds to reflect on our current and future identities in an increasingly digitalized world, where the distinction between reality and virtual reality becomes obsolete.
Who(se) are you? summarizes the trajectory and the interests of Mura, creating participatory works without losing its absolutely individual perspective. It combines the aesthetically beautiful with a trans*gressing message. With works in which we put or remove labels, she invites us to free ourselves of these classifications. It is a question about our essence, our identity, that each one of us can answer differently, and it is an invitation to Freedom.