Interview | Manuela Morgaine: Being an artist was not a choice

What inspired you to create artwork and become an artist? (events, feelings, experiences...)

Being an artist was not a choice nor the consequence of a trigger. It imposed itself as another way of breathing, thinking, seeing, representing. Samuel Beckett calls us "Good at that." I really like this term invented to define those for whom this being sticks to the skin, is one. A form of unfailing creativity that has always been there, undeniably, tirelessly, and in all circumstances of life. If we had to talk about feeling, it is clear that my feelings, since childhood, have always been very intense in relation to all those around me. A very pronounced awareness of the other and of the world. As soon as this awareness nags at us, it becomes urgent to find how to represent it, transfigure it, make something of it at all costs, give it form. For me, it began with writing, theater, then visual arts, cinema, and it has declined each year in more forms.

What is your artistic background, the techniques and subjects you have experimented with to date?

Literature was the matrix. I studied literature, then drama school; language was essential and at the origin of all my creations. I started by writing and publishing books while having a theater company where I wrote and directed my plays, then I did a lot of radio experiments until I missed the image to the point of making films. Then the relief and the living that were at the heart of my theater practice forced me to create scenographies and installations. For about fifteen years, I have been creating performances that bring together all these forms. The main subject of all my creations is the human being and the way in which he has been traversed by the world since the dawn of time. I would say that I seek to invent a contemporary mythology. To succeed in creating artistic ceremonies, kinds of rituals with all the forms that I explore. A space-time where the spectator-visitor is transported to live an artistic experience where memory and emotion are summoned.

What are the 3 aspects that differentiate you from other artists, making your work unique?

It's the fact that I never limit myself to a form, and also the fact that I always renew myself. I like to achieve what I don't know how to do. It's rare that I reproduce a form.

Against all odds, I create every form of art I imagine, even if I can't find the production. My independence is my karma. But I am always free, and it's rare that the work I imagine is free from institutional or commercial constraints.

I am committed body and soul. A work, in my opinion, must disrupt the order of the world, allowing it to be transformed through its alchemy. Whatever happens, it must be a place of resistance to everything that opposes our humanity.

Where does your inspiration come from?

I believe less in inspiration than in consistency. Never stopping, not for a single day, being unwaveringly at work, thinking about how to renew oneself, to reinvent oneself, to be able to offer a fourth dimension day after day. It is this sort of permanence of gesture

artistic that makes it impossible to stop, even if it sometimes suspends its flight, to think, to laze around, to dream. Sight is essential for me. I need to see far, my work depends on horizons. For this reason, travel is always very fertile. I always invent a new form that has been offered to me by the new landscape crossed, the new culture that has taken me out of my comfort zone. The sea, too, is a particle accelerator for my creativity.

What is your artistic approach? What visions, sensations, or feelings do you want to evoke in the viewer?

Visions, sensations, intense feelings that can change his preconceived ideas or his own vision of the world. That some form comes like a door knocker asking him to open and welcome an intruder who wants him well, who dreams of taking him by the hand and leading him to areas he would never have crossed, that we can go far together in the crossing of the mirror. Crossing walls together, entering a new dimension through the work itself would be an ideal. I created a work that is still at the work in progress stage, ORAKL a spokesperson that is a monumental door of ice interactive with the public. He is invited to come and ask questions to the door that answers him. The idea of this ORAKL says well what I seek to provoke in the spectator, both the impression of a kind of mystery necessary to any work of art and also the idea that it can give him answers or in any case that he comes to question it, to rub against it.

What is the creative process of your works? Spontaneous or with a long preparatory process (technique, inspiration from art classics or other)?

It's a very long creative process since I almost never work with the same production teams apart from a few partners who work across almost all of my works. What's spontaneous and fast is the writing, whether for films, performances, installations, and the photographs are very spontaneous. But for the rest, for the creation, it takes years to find the means to produce them, to find the teams, the places to program them. There's also the technical aspect. For A MAIN LEVÉE, a performance I did at the Picasso Museum in 2016, I had to learn how to turn clay. I went to the Musée de Sèvres where a master turner taught me over several weeks how to make a form emerge from a potter's wheel.

Do you use a particular working technique? If so, can you explain it?

It's always a challenge. Apart from cinema, where I'm starting to master all the techniques a little and where I'm well supported by my team, for photography I've spent long weeks exchanging ideas with laboratory technicians to find the support, like recently black plexiglass for a hanging photographic diptych entitled LAMENTATIONS, which was to contain two laminated photographs to be viewed from either side. For installations and performances, once again, each one will require me to learn a new technique that can range from ice sculpture to drawing with gouache or inventing a scenography with sheets. That's the whole challenge, that it's the subject that authentically guides me towards the form and allows me to invent what I've never done before.

Are there any innovative aspects to your work? Can you tell us what they are?

I'm less looking for innovation than invention. I think it's more my way of working that's innovative than the work itself. Perhaps where I felt I'd really done something completely new was when I invented my sound pillows. They're pillows for sleeping upright, placed against a wall at a man's or woman's height. The viewer is invited to place their ear against the pillow, which plays a soundtrack.

And then maybe my way of producing my work is off the beaten track.

Do you have a format or medium that you are most comfortable with? If so, why?

In recent years, it's been ice sculptures and cinema films. Ice sculptures because I design them and have them made by Crystal Group, who are true magicians who bring me a real translucent diamond with each new creation. For me, they are magical blocks that amaze me as much as they amaze the spectators.

And for cinema films, it's such a difficult process to produce a film that the moment you shoot and especially when you get to the editing stage is a very profound emotion. The first screening of a film is probably as intense for me as a live performance. It's a very unique feeling of accomplishment.

Where do you produce your work? At home, in a shared studio, or in your own studio? And in this space, how do you organize your creative work?

I have always produced my works in my studio at home. But more particularly for the past ten years, I have been living on a barge on the Seine and have a very large living and working space. This allows for a day and night continuum. Never interrupting the weaving of the different works in progress. As a multidisciplinary artist, I sometimes write the scripts for my films, a book of literature, sculpt for an installation or take photographs in the same week. For this reason, my studio is both a library with a view conducive to writing, and also an empty space for plastic work or team works, and then there is my film editing room at the very end at the front of my barge which allows me to isolate myself and make it dark. I also work a lot outside, on the deck. I have always needed the horizon and the water nearby.

Does your job require you to travel to meet new collectors, for trade fairs or exhibitions? If so, what does it bring you?

It is mainly my films that allow me to travel to festivals around the world and make essential encounters with producers and festival directors on several continents. My films have allowed me to travel to Poland, the USSR, India, Georgia, Greece, Turkey, Portugal, and Italy. I have never yet traveled for my works of visual art, with the exception of my residency as a Resident of the Villa Medici in 1994 in Rome, where I had the chance to spend several exceptional years creating and meeting other creators.

How do you imagine the evolution of your work and your career as an artist in the future?

I imagine it less than I hope it will be better in terms of financial production. I hope to find the places or people to partner in creation for the creation of monumental works that are difficult to achieve. And I hope for an international career because I cannot imagine shining only within the perimeter of my place of residence, my country of origin. More than ever in these times of war, being a citizen of the world and working everywhere in contact with the populations and cultures of the world is essential to me.

What is the theme, style or technique of your latest artistic production?

This is probably what has upset me the most since the attacks that hit France in 2015: namely the massacre of October 7, 2023 perpetrated by Hamas and the annihilation of Gaza and its population that followed and that continues before our eyes daily ever since. If we can call it a theme, I would define it as OUR HUMANITY. I worked two months after October 7 on a work that I called OUR KIDS the color of peace and which is above all a gesture of peace. It was a work entirely focused on the children of Israel and Palestine. I created an installation in lead sheets: casts of children's bodies of different ages, separated by pomegranate fruits. Ten small casts that I arranged in a star shape on the ground with this fruit of fertility for the Middle East which also evoked of course the grenade weapon.

And above these lead sheet casts, I created a sort of photographic altarpiece: LAMENTATIONS. A two-sided diptych in black plexiglass, photographs of Israeli and Palestinian mothers on either side, like a single body suspended in the center of the space, to say once again that all tears are salty, on both sides.

Can you tell us about your most important exhibition experience?

It was undoubtedly this creation, OUR KIDS - the color of peace & LAMENTATIONS , that was my most significant exhibition. I self-produced it because no institution wanted to host it in Paris. I was told it was too "hot off the press." But it seems to me that artists are there to bear witness precisely in the heat of the moment, to allow those who can't find the words or forms to express their feelings to recognize themselves in a form, to adhere to it. We created a musical piece with my partner Michaël Grébil Liberg, and it was therefore a space inhabited by sound and bodies where visitors could meditate. We first showed it at Isabelle Suret's venue, the 7.5, in the heart of the fifth arrondissement of Paris, for one evening, then a year later, because the conflict was growing and mobilizing us more and more. It was at the Atelier Lardeur, on Rue du Cherche Midi in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, a fabulous former stained-glass workshop. It was the most important exhibition, not in terms of recognition by the contemporary art world, but because hundreds of visitors came and were deeply moved in turn, grateful that we had found a space and a way to give form to this unrepresentable. And create a place of contemplation.

The artist facing conflicts, in our disrupted times, is a kind of ethic which suddenly takes precedence over career.

If you could create one famous work in the history of art, which would you choose? And why?

In all humility, since you allow me to access the inaccessible absolute, I hesitate between the negative hands of the Lascaux cave and the starry sky painted by Giotto on the ceiling of the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi in Umbria. In both cases they are universal, primitive works that speak for themselves, and to each one. These parietal hands that come to us from the depths of the origin of our humanity, that rubbed themselves with soot, the blood of animals, chalk, grime, fire, and that came to be affixed to stone walls to create the ancestor of Art, it is magical and it amazes me. This night sky with thousands of stars as if made by a celestial hand, in the case of Giotto in the 13th century, it is so beautiful that we forget that it is painting. It feels like a real experience of a starry sky, a Milky Way, in the middle of nature. Both of these artistic experiences/visions were mystical for me.

If you could invite any famous artist (dead or alive) to dinner, who would it be? How would you suggest they spend the evening?

I would suggest to Miquel Barceló, a Majorcan painter, draftsman, engraver, sculptor, and ceramist for whom I have the greatest admiration and who has always inspired me, to invite him aboard a boat in the Mediterranean, which is the surface that binds us together. The most beautiful evening with him would consist of having a workshop on deck and sculpting together clay of all colors that we would let take shape thanks and only thanks to the jolts caused by the waves, unbalancing each other. Letting the earth take shape under our hands, pushed by the foam and the swell, would be a unique and magical achievement. And then, only if we were still hungry, perhaps nibble on grilled squid under the stars.