Kintsugi for After the Battle | Javier Erre

Through his project 'My Grandfather Was a Nationalist', Javier Erre addresses the trauma caused by the Spanish Civil War and its persistence in collective memory as a latent wound. Developed in a biographical key, he fictionalizes the journey of his paternal grandfather as a volunteer for the Nationalist side, a story that he never told him, and to which the author gained access thanks to the discovery of some documents. This piece presents a paradoxical image, intimately inserted into the war conflict, but at the same time alien to it. It brings together the small micro-histories of its protagonists — with their longings and future projections — with that macro-history that imposes itself on the individual: on a station platform, a group of nurses stroll, cheerfully, under the gaze of the soldiers waiting for the train that will take them perhaps to the front? back home? Beyond the narrative, beyond what the image shows and hides, what Javier Erre proposes is a kind of re-evaluation. Through this image, appropriated, distorted, and "wounded" by the random impact of 39 9mm shots, the artist carries out a reparative action, of a poetic nature, by filling each of the holes with gold thread; only two remain to be covered. An action that connects with the Japanese concept of kintsugi, but which, beyond understanding the wound as a constitutive part of one's own history, projects the need for reconstruction over ruin, over disagreement.