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Kintsugi is a mural created by artist Neve in October 2020 in Asti for E-Distribuzione (Enel Group) as part of the Cabine in Rosa – Giro d'Italia 2020 project, winning first prize at the Street Art Challenge.
"Kintsugi" is a large-scale mural painted on an electrical distribution cabin in Asti, as part of the Cabine in Rosa project — E-Distribuzione's programme of site-specific urban art interventions along the route of the Giro d'Italia. The 2020 edition of the Giro ran from October 3 to October 25, postponed from its traditional May dates due to the COVID-19 pandemic; twelve cabins were produced for the edition, tracing a parallel tour of Italy from Palermo to Asti. Asti was the final destination of this parallel route. "Kintsugi" won the first prize of the Street Art Challenge Giro d'Italia Special Edition. The work takes its title and concept from the Japanese art of kintsugi — the practice of repairing broken ceramics with gold lacquer, treating the cracks and damage as part of the object's history rather than something to be hidden. The piece embraces damage and refuses to conceal wounds. In the year of COVID-19, the concept was precise. On the main face of the cabinet: a classical female bust — a woman with a mural crown (corona muralis, the castellated crown worn by the civic goddess Tyche in antiquity, protector of cities) — rendered in the white-grey of ancient marble. The surface is cracked through with fractures, from which gold light seeps: the cracks are luminous, not catastrophic. They are the kintsugi lines. A network of lightning-bolt fissures in white and pink-red radiates across the dark background and onto the sides of the cabinet, glowing like neon against the deep brown-black ground. The sculpture's face is composed — not broken in expression, only in surface. The multi-face composition wraps the cabinet as a three-dimensional object, with the crack patterns continuing unbroken around its corners.