Museums and archives are institutions designed to preserve the memory of a community. Joan Fontcuberta rummages through their collections to find photographic documents that have deteriorated over time and, paradoxically, lost their memory. These fragile, ailing, amnesiac images are salvaged by a procedure that recalls the Zen technique of Kintsugi: a piece of broken pottery is not discarded, but repaired, a thread of gold marking the fracture line. Emphasising scars is a form of resilience, of acceptance of the vicissitudes of life. In Kintsugi, Joan Fontcuberta assembles a poetic and conceptual gathering of phantasmal images that evoke the passage of time, the recording of history, and the very substance of photography.
