Kommagene Kintsugi is a site specific project for Kommagene Biennial 2024 in Turkey. It was inspired by ‘kintsugi’, the Japanese concept of repairing what is broken, revalidating it and accept change. In Kahta/Adiyaman this philosophy engages with the damage, loss and grieve after the big earthquake in 2024, while referring equally to the resilience of the community and nature. The project seeks to intertwine the cultural narrative of repairing broken objects with an environmental message of accepting loss, embracing change and fostering a harmonious relationship between humanity and nature.
The art work was realized with the help of the children of the village of Belören.
A video of the process can be watched here: https://youtu.be/m8gKIVbWveo
(text by Gökmen Gül) Embracing your damage The photo, with the old traditional house that has turned into ruins and the pieces of broken plates flowing through it like a river, reminded me not only of the earthquake and disaster I experienced, but also of the house I had lived in since my childhood and all those fragmented images that had been going back and forth between the houses.
You know, in cinematographic narratives, a person’s mind about the past is reflected on the screen as images with intermittent reflections like flashes exploding between the present and the past. Mine is such a remembrance. A house is a kind of shelter for us, but it is a shelter that we lose, disappears and sometimes even destroys us at certain intervals in life. I also understood the feeling that our shelter, which we think is safe, sometimes destroys us during earthquake disasters.
With a long-term career in sculpture and site specific art, Dutch artist Karin Van Der Molen, came to Adıyaman for the Komagene Biennial. She has made a work on site with the children living in this village. Here Van Der Molen is actually referring to “Healing”, which is the main theme of the Biennial. Van Der Molen transformed the pieces of plates/porcelain flowing through the ruined house into an image reminiscent of a flowing river, based on the old Japanese philosophy of Kintsugi. According to the Japanese Kintsugi philosophy, breaking does not actually mean loss, but a new existence. It expresses the idea of treating the breaking and repair of an object as a part of the past of that object, not as something to be hidden. Kintsugi is a kind of “embracing one’s damage” art. I think that when Van Der Molen first imagined such a work, setting the hundreds of people who experienced the disaster in this region and the word “Healing” side by side, she seems to be emphasizing, beyond an artistic concern, how the people in this region have embraced or will always embrace their own damage, knowing that their losses, pain and sadness will never go away. I have never met Van Der Molen, but I think that she has sharpened her senses enough to be able to notice the voices in the silence, the unseen in the visible. Because Van Der Molen has not been looking at events from a cold, empty place like the usual “we embrace you”. Just like in Kintsugi, she draws attention to the fact that the rupture is not something to be hidden, but a part of what we will live with. And she also refers to the fact that it will not be forgotten, and should not be forgotten. Because, in my opinion, forgetting or pretending it doesn’t exist is nothing more than constantly folding your own darkness over yourself. Perhaps “Healing” starts right here.
When you evaluate a work of art, a sculpture, a painting or a photograph, it is not exactly what that work contains, but what kind of emotional state it creates in you and where it corresponds to in your world, in my opinion. In this sense, it is very meaningful that Van Der Molen refers to Kintsugi in this work and visualizes it like a river that flows (or goes). Isn’t life like that anyway; like a river that constantly repairs itself with its cracks and damages and flows..
I would like to thank Van Der Molen for her sharp and elegant thoughts, and for all the children who collaborated with her in this work.
