About This Project

Serena Biagini

Kyua

Photographs applied on glass with gold pigment inserts, 20×30 cm. Kintsugi is a Japanese technique. Indeed, a metaphor. Normally applied to ceramics, kintsugi is employed to adjust an object, through a paste of gold. The joints created by this type of intervention end up ennobling the damaged artifact, giving it a new life, imbued with preciousness and beauty. It is in the enhancement of fragility, that a renewed form of identity is found, after struggling with the difficulties of existence. Kintsugi, in fact, is a cure (kyua, in Japanese), a transformation, a metamorphosis of pain and brokenness: an act of love dispensed, here, to two archival photographs. Deliberately anonymous images, used to overcome any egocentric drift and look with empathy at a universal fate. These two women resemble each other, perhaps, but they do not know each other or us. They have simply lived. Their faces are ours as well, and they pass on a deep, shared dignity, a pride that is found even as they self-consciously display scars clad in gold. (The photo uploaded is the set of 8 works that make up the entire project in order from first to last).

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