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Curated by Mika Taanila.
2018-2020(22)

Recurring (2018-2020|22) and hybrid residency at International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

The curatorial premise: a slowed down live cinema, away from sensational excess and towards the exploration of post-capitalist ideas. The decline of manual labor in many fields rises important questions concerning automatism and the problem of the ‘obsolete human’; under such thought, expanded cinema, which is usually conditioned by the presence of a live element, became the starting point. What if such cinema became the only peaceful and intimate oasis available? An antithesis to bit size culture. What if there is absolutely no manipulating narrative? What if…

Ficciones then, explored through expanded projection, performance and gardening, ideas concerning the “immediate” together with notions such as intimacy, touch, care and living matter, duration as meditation, action displaced, múltiple register, creative feedback and synchronicity.

Starting in 2018 with the making of ceramic sculptures at a 1:1 ratio with a chest cavity, so that they too could become containers of heart. They where then ‘planted’ during a performance while having a live/delayed projection.

The sculptures became the main actores and hosts of a living ecosystem of moss. Activating, through out the year, the contemplation of their caretakers – local collaborators.

These extremely slow movies where filmed in 2019 with a multiple super-8 camera mobile. Multiplicity, decentralization and gravity inspired such making. The rushes where projected while poetic thoughts on the process where read out loud.

The residency concluded in the screening of the final film, Ficciones.

Solo Show – C113, CalArts – 2014

No chronotope in their translations,
as if their lack of color was their limitation.
So then, they are not The work;
bare prototypes only, bones that never made it to the moving world.
Each, with independent miniature dramas become the objects of a study, the documentation of a frozen process.

And although the exhibition space makes of things neat presentations,
a transparent curtain standing between the human eye and the altered tumbleweed branch, calls to our attention the lack of spectacle.
A spectacle we suddenly openly worship, next to the notion of failure, and are taught of its privileged experience, a here-and-now that could never be translated as such with an artificial lens.
Only binary vision and the brain can ignite the play between the courageous reds, in the foreground, and the shyer blues of the spectrum seen at a distance.

They propose:
‘A world is still in process of taking place’
In the meantime, nature is seen as if it where an artifice.

The failure to be films is a sense of double loss.
The tumbleweed dies, comes detached to guarantee collective existence, it travels to spread its seeds. Movement powered by wind.
We could say it stays alive in action. Life exceeds small definition.

Yet brought here it dies again; becomes only the image of itself,
a hologram caught in a Ping-Pong game between dimensions.

Something similar is happening to the others too,
Becoming is The Ghost.
None of these are.

Solo show from residency @ Generator Projects Gallery, Dundee – 2012

GENERATORprojects temporarily became the studio in which Manuela opened up her practice to those visiting the space. Exploring the notion of maquettes, uncompomassing formats of proposal, as part of an on-going research into their potential to take our perception to ‘monumental’ manifestations, virtual destinies, as well as being proper and finalized sculptural works, parallels were drawn with the gesture of an open studio: in which the intimacies of an artist’s practice are exposed to wider participation.

What graduated me from art school.

I have been busy falling for someone.
The sentence above is a personal sentence. It is included here to be critically questioned. Through this questioning I will try to present the manner of my research and highlight some of the features, subjects, of my work.
The “I” above, is opposite to what I search-for while working (I aim for a for-them, like-them, for-that, about-that, for-you, or by-it, or all of them), but like with some other work’s titles, I expose the “I” to humor myself, to stress my self-awareness and evoke, if possible, sympathy (I fear total foreignness in my work). So then, Why share this here and now?
Is the “busy” justifying some lack of presence or attention in everything that has been happening next to the “falling for someone” (eg. graduating)?
Is the writer making a division between personal life and work practice?
Is the “I” shared because it can’t see the division?
Is the “I” concerned with how much it shares by keeping information undisclosed?
Who is this “someone”?
Is it a “someone” or could it refer to something?
Is the “I” shy?
Is the sentence independent from the writer?
Do the words within the sentence refer to art talk? “Falling”?
Could “falling” refer to failure? Acknowledging B. J. Ader’s work.
Is the present tense in the verb avoiding finalization and keeping the fall uncertain?
What does it mean to share the act of “falling for someone” next to the notion of failure?
Is failure in love less seductive than failure in artworks?
The uncertain “I”, in the process of “falling”, has not fallen but is experiencing the pleasure that comes with “falling for someone”, could this mirror art practice, an in-process process?
Is “falling” one of those things that everyone can relate to?
Is the work successful enough for the viewer to relate to?
If love is the grand topic behind this small sentence, are the art works small proposals of similar grandiosities?
If “falling” is present and recent, was this “I” alone before?
Can that be seen in the work?
Has the “I” behind the works been successfully abstracted?
If not, does this failure highlight its conflict?
Is there confidence behind all this?

“Falling” and my interest in the inherent failure to present what is beyond me: has made me feel like a kid, a three-lettered word, small.
Nothing is quite there.

Was the 2011 graduate show at EMBASSY. It features the work of four emerging artists who graduated from Scottish art schools in 2011: Laurie Macpherson, Manuela De Laborde y Ross Little.