Gallery Entry
Kintsugi: Where the Cracks Become Light
By Patricia Costa · MZ
Kintsugi is a series of 24 works built on documentary photographs I made over more than twenty-five years of fieldwork on health, gender and social change in Mozambique: a boy walking barefoot through floodwater to save his school shoes, a woman over seventy who walked four hundred kilometres to flee the war in Cabo Delgado, women waiting weeks to give birth far from home. Around each photograph I build botanical forms, capulana patterns and a disc of gold. The title comes from the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, so that the fracture becomes part of the object's history. The gold marks where inequality, distance or conflict has cracked a life, and where the person has held together anyway. The people in these works are not illustrations of poverty; they look back. The human part of this work cannot be generated: the encounter, the trust, the moment someone allowed me to photograph them, and the short text that records what was said. The series was shown in 2026 in the solo exhibition I See You, Maputo.