photo performance
A photo performance, also called performance for camera, is a performance which is solely performed to be photographed, with no live public. The final exhibited work is the photographic record of the action.
time capsule | 2020
The Time Capsule series ia an allegory of a couple's day-by-bay during the Coronavirus Pandemic.
They performers, inside a water capsule, in apnea, portray their daily routine as a couple, balancing confrontations and mutual support in this novel space-time reality that was imposed upon their life. The capsule not only symbolizes the confinement, but also the perception of how time elapses: weeks that loop repeatedly, suspended hours, merging nights and days.
The fact that the performers are unable to breathe evokes issues of those times: the fear of a lethal virus, as well as the global asphyxiating racial issue, and the burning of the Amazon forest.
It is a time capsule that is not destined to future decades or centuries, but to its own contemporaneity.
Concept and images: Maurizio Mancioli | Action: Lillian Hastings and Maurizio Mancioli.
mirror | 2016
In Mirror, Mancioli proposes an intimate - and at the same time external - look at the Sardinian land, that he cherishes and keeps on discovering after more than 40 years. It is a strong, crude and archetypical land, with its secrets and myths, an impassible testimony of the passage of centuries, that seems to remind us constantly of how ephemeral we are. The dialog between this land and two female twins, with their potent physicality, is a glance through the mirror of memory, where present and past confront each other. In our imaginary, Mirror reminds us of the Dea Mater, the primordial Mother Earth divinity.
Conception and images: Maurizio Mancioli | With: Benedetta Planetta and Valentina Planetta | Special thanks to Gloria Mancioli.
the lovers | abysm | gravity | various series 2011-2016
Ana Montenegro and Maurizio Mancioli's body of work examines states of imprisonment, pressure, solitude, emptiness, as well as human fragility and vulnerability. It derivates from an intersection between performance and the protocols of digital photography, addressing the concept of real and virtual (the real which is present in the protocols of performance, and the virtual, present in the protocols of synthetic image), to question reality and fiction in contemporary relationships.
The images play with possible and impossible universes in difficult balance. Simultaneously absent and present beings. Non-lived lives, virtual, improbable existences, where everything is temporarily on hold.
Conception and action: Ana Montenegro and Maurizio Mancioli | Images: Maurizio Mancioli
capsule | display | various series 2011-2016
The images show a body protected by a glass or a plastic wrap, but at the same time, it is exposed as a product, hence suggesting vulnerability, fragility, imprisonment, solitude. The series explores the frontier between reality and fiction in contemporary relationships.
Conception: Ana Montenegro and Maurizio Mancioli | Action: Ana Montenegro | Images: Maurizio Mancioli
solocomoscas | 2015
In the endurance performance Solocomoscas (alone with flies), the artist draws flies on a white wall during 28 days in her house/studio (the lifecycle of the fly is about one lunar cycle). The white wall filled with drawings of flies suggests transience as a counterpoint. The work questions the relationship between drawing and performance; moreover, the live happening that was lost by the spectator is mediated by the images of a photographic camera.
Conception and action: Ana Montenegro | Images: Maurizio Mancioli