In the paradigm of conceptual art, performance shares its austerity with other forms of representation. In cases where, beyond the body and its expressiveness in space-time, a material element is used, the selection is crucial: in the best performances, the object is simple, modest, and of everyday use. Its significance, however, roots us in a specific place and time, while simultaneously expanding our imagination from the concrete to the universal. Like a magical talisman, capable of aligning local and conceptual coordinates.

This is the case in Monica Mura’s piece The Soap Wall with Aleppo soap. Whether in block form or as a simple bar manipulated by the artist, it connects us to that and other wars we forget at the behest of the media agenda. At the same time, it relates to every personal, social, and human situation that would require our commitment rather than “washing our hands” with indifference.

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

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

The work of artist Monica Mura (Cagliari, 1979) can be read from multiple perspectives, but one of the main ones is precisely her commitment to women’s history. Mura is interested in recovering memory, as she did in the project AUSENCIA-PRESENCIA. Your void is my absence, your memory is my presence (2017), but she also works with the possibility of art to transform reality.

Equally important is the active role of her works, which require the participation of the public, questioning how they look and asking what each of us does individually to end inequalities. Besides women, other marginalized groups, such as trans people or those at risk of social exclusion, have become protagonists in Mura’s work, who, far from taking a privileged position and directing the gaze, “lets herself be acted upon” to relearn the place where she positions herself as an artist. …

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The artistic work of Monica Mura is committed and engaged from feminist conceptual and discursive positions, as can be seen in her artistic trajectory and particularly in her multidisciplinary and multidimensional exhibition project E ti que (de quen) vés sendo?.

The body, the socialized signifiers implied by sex/gender categories in patriarchal societies, but also the openings and dynamics of these categories toward a diverse, elastic plurality, including transgender identities, without ignoring the memory of what we have been and still mostly are today—men and women, behaviorally differentiated, in hierarchy, dependency, and roles.

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

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The kintsukuroi (in Japanese: gold repair) is an ancient Japanese ceramic technique used to fix ceramic fractures, using resin varnish sprinkled or mixed with gold, silver, or platinum powder, so that once repaired, the object shows and emphasizes the traces of the fractures—in gold—making the objects unique. Kintsukuroi is part of a philosophy that suggests that breaks and repairs are not only part of an object’s history and should be shown rather than hidden, but also make the object valuable. The fractures reveal the object’s experience, transformation, and history.

Mura’s work, structured, clear, strong yet sensitive, faces things head-on. It shows traces of pain, but also of courage. The courage of a body that, by showing its scars, simultaneously shows the inflicted wound, the healing, and the transformation. No body remains the same after battle; no being walks the same after fracture. The body transforms, the walk also. And thought, and the relationship with others. Against the victim, Mura speaks of the survivor; against fragility, Mura speaks of courage, strength, and the resilience that life requires. 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, the future. …

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Monica Mura draws from interactions with the social realm 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 communal, what stands out in her work is this curious quality, questioning and marveling at her immediate context. Her languages circle around the performative, translate and interrogate bodies, and connect 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 of experiences, hers and others’, provides the key to the power of empathy. Observing them often serves as a prelude to a critical perception of the environment, especially when it touches on questions of identity.

She speaks of a world that both celebrates and contradicts itself, reflecting its inconsistencies from activism but also revealing affects. What happens with her images intertwines with the pulse of life through small undisciplined acts that delocalize the everyday to uncover its fissures. To act like that crack which breaks the rhythm of what is established and makes it different. …

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The work of multidisciplinary artist Monica Mura is transgressive, critical, and passionate, 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 in her work is undoubtedly a major challenge in contemporary society. Monica addresses the image from different perspectives: the role of women, the dictatorship of images, and 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 mainly from 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 clearest example of the overvaluation of the body in contemporary society. The concept of beauty becomes a collective standard, with the “label” of what it means to be beautiful—generic for everyone, but not individual, as it should be treated. Each year, new ways to achieve the ideal body are invented: silicone, botox, liposuction, and perhaps worst of all so far, anabolic steroids, extremely harmful to health.

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Monica Mura starts from the body and the multiple variations through which it adopts meanings, whether in the pose, the dress, 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 model in process, where the act of looking becomes as endless as desire.

Monica Mura starts from the memory of herself that emerges from small family photos, from free animals, from an imaginary of nostalgia and fabulation that she transforms into an artifact; an object that is also the trace of her action by changing the scales and the arrangement 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 those of 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 summons us to look with our skin, with touch, with hearing, with our own album of experiences and emotions. She does so by playing with words and extending the perceptive ambiguity of the common phrase “…who do you come from being?”, which in our culture leads us towards somewhere, perhaps towards a resilient home and towards the disappearance of gender. …

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Performance as a tool for transformation. 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 sensitive ground with her works. As aesthetic as they are profound, in them every element is a symbol, every object a metaphor. Through an autobiographical narrative, Mura always moves us in common places, where personal memories become universal, where her roots blend with those of all the people who, in some way, ‘have contributed to being.’ Polyhedric and versatile, the artist approaches 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).

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

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

The work of Monica Mura (Cagliari, 1979) has had a significant approach to gender, feminism, and advocacy 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 goal of breaking the silence on women’s experiences and participating in an international campaign to eliminate gender-based violence. Mura proved to be an artist committed to equality and to women since this first meeting, although her artistic production has since followed different paths.

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