The Cracks by Jeroen de Jongh Photography

"There is a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in", sang the legendary Canadian singer and poet Leonard Cohen in his song Anthem (1992). Striving for perfection makes little sense, said Cohen, because life consists of change and decay. Yet there is always hope, and it is precisely the imperfections in what we do and make that we must embrace; it is the damages and flaws that give character to a person or an object.

Even though in our western society it is mainly the 'uncracked' and perfect that is celebrated, Karolina Howorko noticed that embracing the cracked and imperfect is very natural in, for example, kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold or silver lacquer. The centuries-old philosophy behind this working method is that cracks show the very history of the object, that they act as a (warning) sign for great forces that influence it and that they create unique and beautiful patterns on an object - in the words of the poet, they let the light in.

Just as Japanese craftsmen used to do, Howorko turns the cracks in the Montelbaan tower (1516) into a work of art. With slides, colour filters and lamps she creates glowing cracks that slowly spread over the surface, as if they reveal a piece of a hidden story in the tower. For Howorko, the tower symbolises something much bigger: the enormous forces in our present society that cause climate systems, institutions, assumptions and traditions to shake on their found