Donna Bassin Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW collaborative care. I want the viewer to understand that we hurt ourselves when we damage the earth. As the world falls apart, so will we. The earth is falling apart as we lose fertile land, animals, birds, rivers, trees, and glaciers. I try to keep things from getting lost. I rip natural resources from one location and tape them to another- to repair the damage, restore the losses, and put the land back together. Another interesting project of yours that we would like to introduce to our readers is entitled Precious Scars, a stimulating series that — introducing the viewers to the Japanese art of kintsugi — questions the processes of rupture and repair that occur in every life: how important is for you to create artworks rich of allegorical qualities? Donna Bassin: My work doesn't have allegorical qualities in the sense of the usual definition of allegory when symbolic characters and their activity carry ideas about humanness. However, I agree that I materially act or interact with the photograph to express interior states or illuminate human behavior symbolically. I rely on actions upon the photograph, such as ripping and suturing, which I hope will be viscerally experienced as wounds and scars, not just intellectually understood. I borrowed Kintsugi's Japanese philosophy and craft for I extended its original use to repair broken pottery to describe or metaphorically make visible the injuries we inflict on each other, the fragility and vulnerability of being human, and the persistence of these wounds underneath the surface. But back to your observation, perhaps in the Environmental Melancholiaproject, where I have created fictionalized versions of landscapes to find essential truths my work