The cigua—a fist carved in jet, thumb pressed between fingers—is Asturias’s most ancient amulet. The gesture is inherently feminine: a vulva, obscene and sacred at once, traditionally worn to shield mothers and newborns from the evil eye.

But here, the cigua rises. Mounted on a silver plate echoing military dog tags, it braids the feminine with the coded masculine, protection with confrontation—a ward turned against the very roles it once guarded.

The jet is 180 million years old, recovered from the slag heaps of a closed mine—waste made precious again. Asturians have shaped it for at least 19,000 years. But today the seams lie locked beneath protected shores. Mines shuttered, permits impossible, artisans dwindling—a craft fading without succession.

This is a half cigua—what the reclaimed material allowed. Incompleteness as intention. Scarcity as protest.

An ancient ward, raised.