sophiagratia:

The first two things that come to mind:

• a flock of flightless birds
• once i wrote a story in which kira shoots a fresco

So we are more or less doomed, here. I haven’t thought about this much before, but here are my impressions at a first attempt.

Art for Kira is, first, about ruin. About damage, and loss. That is what violent occupations do to art. This is her first concept of art: stolen paintings and sculptures, damaged buildings, a campaign of disinformation about Bajoran achievements in the arts.

Then art must be, later, about recovery, about salvage. What can be restored, recovered, unburied.

Kira doesn’t have much in the way of an aesthetic sensibility, or at least that’s what she would claim. She forms strong attachments to art objects, and articulating why, or what it is about the object’s aesthetic features that draws her to it, is less interesting to her than the fact of the object and the fact of her attachment.

Perhaps she begins with a disdain for ‘pure decoration,’ prizing only art that has a use: prayer mandalas, for example. But perhaps with time she starts to see that the useful/decorative binary doesn’t hold up. What if something is useful because of the feeling it provokes? What if, like her prayer mandala, a useful object is also decorative? These simple questions occur to her relatively late in life, and the result is that she develops a reverence for the very fact of objects that provoke them.

She will never be a collector, but she will learn that to stand before a beautiful thing in contemplation of it is a worthwhile act – and it is an act that demands that the work of art be referred to itself, and not to any gesture of possession or mastery. She will for this reason prefer museums to private possessions, and temples to museums.

That act of contemplation is itself an act of recovery, of restoration and unburial. And for this reason, she will work hard to see that Bajor’s art finds public homes, that art objects are returned to the places that first housed them, and that any space – a temple, a museum, a library archive – devoted to art objects will be freely accessible to anyone, so that those recuperative acts of contemplation belong to anyone, to everyone.

This is a good post, I like this post, the fic you actually linked is new to me and looks interesting, but I would also like to know what fic you intended to link. It doesn’t look to be this one, what with the “Oparu” in the author’s-name section.

Tags:

#Star Trek #DS9 #Kira Nerys #I deleted the first version of this post because it was reblogged from Llin #and Sophie is less likely to see and respond to my question if I don’t reblog it directly from her

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