Monica Mura draws from social interactions through an analysis focused on traditions, culture, and the channels that shape history. With a deep gender commitment that permeates identities and expands her discourse from the intimate to the collective, one thing that stands out in her work is this curious stance, questioning and marveling at her immediate context. Her languages encompass the performative, translate and interrogate bodies, and link to video and photography as an expanded reality that documents and sensitizes the viewer. She listens to the sonic, the intense, and the unnoticed, creating meeting spaces where the installation is associated with memory and the structure of each place. In many cases, her works are organized around the experiential, as if the exchange between her experiences and those of others provided the key to the power of empathy. Therefore, observing them often feels like a prelude to a critical perception of the environment, especially when it affects identity issues. Her work speaks of a world that celebrates and contradicts itself at the same time, reflecting its incoherencies through activism while also revealing emotions. What happens with her images intertwines with the pulse of life as small undisciplined acts that delocalize the everyday to find its fissures. To act as that crack that breaks the rhythm of the established and makes it diverse.
Visually, her work has evolved toward the synthesis of form, maintaining the symbolism of a chromatic scale confined between black, red, and gold. She gradually abandons figuration in search of the language of matter, understanding the importance of the very elements that compose her works as potential storytellers. These are stories that generally arise from the emotional and begin with the autobiographical, relating to childhood, sensory, affective, and interpersonal encounters, for which she devises interrelation formulas in which the material or formal choices of the piece affect its own reading. Something similar occurs in Ser son, an exhibition and performance project created specifically for Sala Alterarte, in which she highlights the cultural significance of the carnival masks of the province of Ourense through a soundscape reinterpreted in contemporary language. With the collaboration of several local mask groups, the installation is presented as a dialogue: a dialogue with tradition, with Galicia, but also with other communities worldwide and specifically with her place of origin, Sardinia, whose carnival is also characterized by dances and parades of men wearing costumes, masks, and bells. In this way, Ser son continues the work of a previous piece, Sonallas, where Monica Mura used a belt of hanging ropes with eleven original iron cowbells from the Italian island to activate the melody of that place with her body—a place that is both her home and her roots. Establishing a sensitive and cultural connection, this time she adapts her proposal to Galicia by relating the different characters of the entroido of the province of Ourense through the leitmotiv of bell use in traditional costumes.
Little bells, jingles, cowbells, chocallas, chocallos, axóuxeres, chocas, chocos, esquilas. … are some of the elements of the installation, giving each mask a golden rope. In direct dialogue with each association or lender, Monica Mura conducted interesting field research to collect data on materials, sizes, places of production, types of bells used, and the people wearing the masks. Some of the conclusions include the gradual loss of local artisanal bell-making and a shift toward more egalitarian practices that began taking shape after the dictatorship ended.
Unlike Sardinia, almost all masks using bells in the Ourense carnival are currently worn by both men and women. While older participants began incorporating this practice in recent decades, newer groups are established as mixed from the start. It is also interesting to understand the ethnographic background of a practice that encompasses different social approaches. Through conversations with representatives of each group, the artist learned the individual and collective stories that activate the authenticity of the entroido each year and which merge across generations, uncovering details such as the relationship between the type of mask worn and the wearer’s purchasing power, listening to testimonies connected to religious practices or social suspicions, and preserving a memory in constant evolution.
By removing the visual impact of the masks to focus on their sound record, Monica Mura transfers the identity-based musicality of each place to the exhibition space. She creates a work in which the evocation of the outside and festive environment can be sensed in the intimate scale of the room, reinforced by the subtle gradation of gold forming the ropes with their corresponding bells. The golden color places the artist’s creative corpus in a tradition linked to sacred art, the idea of divinity, and the evocation of gold as a system of power and transcendence, which, in her case, is reclaimed through a new concept: resilience. Both associations are naturally assumed with the intention of moving from a discourse tied to dominant power systems—usually linked to ecclesiastical institutions—to the urgency of returning power to people; to minorities, to the bonds that arise within the community. This particular revisitation of classical art codes manages to dissolve hierarchies, producing a dissociation in traditional reading resolved through plastic rebellion. Symbolic, synthetic; minimal yet powerful.
In all her proposals, Monica Mura offers a form of resistance: against dominant thinking, against norms, against oblivion. Oblivion would trigger the restructuring of social narratives. In this case, one should ask who has the authority to invent new traditions and from what perspective their construction would be developed. In this sense, Ser son begins as a study of the Ourense entroido, from which certain behaviors and evolutions can be deduced. In Ourense, there are currently 18 active masks whose costumes include some type of bell, and several generations remain concerned with their preservation. The artist explores these approaches as the origin of her work, aiming to understand the context of the story she is about to construct. She does so to preserve memory but also to question it without losing her capacity for judgment. From there, she focuses on the body, on all bodies, as promoters of folklore and uses her own as a vehicle to unify their voices. When she activates the elements composing the piece and the cowbells, chocallas, esquilas, chocos… begin to sound, a kind of exorcism occurs in our perception, a performative act full of suffering and delight. The weight of so many ropes and objects borne by a single body is felt, as is the physical presence of those objects insisting on revealing their transcendence while being abstracted into the lightness of dance. Her visual development proposes a central composition embodying the metaphor of a spider’s web: elements radiate toward the edges, threads that modify and simulate frequencies, allowing the action to unfold at the center and highlighting the body again as creator and trigger. Closing our eyes, we still perceive tensions, rhythms, pauses, and the vibrations of a ritual where rehearsal and improvisation embrace differences. The sound of the entroido, now different through the prism of contemporary creation, maintains the sense of its essence.