During her artistic run, Manni has faced different themes, contemporarily spacing in different expressive fields, from the painting to the sculpture, from the performance to the installations, to the scenography, often operating a contamination of languages and styles.
The painting has been her initial passion from which the other expressive forms evolved, following interlaced runs from the figurative one to the informal one, from the intimate character to that public.
About painting, her first period is devoted to the "Contaminations" and the works, essentially figurative, show various aspects of our contemporaneity, characterized by strong contrasts and radicals mutations, that are redrawing the nature of the man and his existential space.
For some works, like those of the cycle "New Africa" and "Fame d’ Africa", Manni proposes pictorial "portraits" of ours actual "worldwide landscape", characterized by strong economic and cultural discrepancies, inside which the minorities are forced more and more to the borders, on the way of the extinction or under conditions of extreme exploitation. And these minorities seem to look us, jumping out of the paintings, inviting to the reflection and the search of new equilibriums.
The same language of the first paintings is recovered again in some following digital manipulations that Manni realizes starting from photos effected in her various travels abroad, especially in the third world, creating images of strong impact or contrarily surreal atmospheres.
Other paintings are, instead, related to the body and its intrinsic mutations currently in progress.
Consequently to the spread of the new technologies, the development of the mass-media, the globalization of the life and the culture, the body is losing more and more its primary importance as cognitive instrument and subject of action, delegating its sensory experience to the acquisition of indirect data on the reality that originate from the informative media. In some of these works, therefore, as those of the cycle "Controevoluzione", the bodies are reproduced in black and white, almost fixed in the instant of their petrification; in other works as the series realized with ink on paper, the bodies are introduced as fragments of contaminated human images, that preserve sometimes a feeling of endless nostalgia for their primordial condition.
In the following "Eruzioni", Manni realizes works that testify a change of sign: not only the figure disappears for an informal symbolic narration, but the works purchase relief, using more the sculptural language than that pictorial. In the series of "Eruzioni", Manni gives voice and expression to underground energies, to unknown strengths that live in the meanders of the unconscious or in the mysterious folds of our universe...... from these depths, from these meanders, these energies seem to emerge and to storm in the rational world with an anxious "eruptive" power.
The recent project "Leggerezza" discloses, instead, other aspects of Manni’s personality, introducing an antidote against the heaviness, the philosophy, exactly, of the "Lightness" (= Leggerezza, in Italian)
The artist writes:
«The “Lightness” represents for me a way of life, a voluntarily induced plagiarism of the thought to not sink itself in the “heaviness” of the world, but to rise itself above it, dissolving it in light and antimatter ».
«Lightness is to be essential, elimination of the superfluous, search of authenticity........ Lightness is fluidity, mobility, mutability, nomadism, against every root and affiliation............... It is attention to the particular one, to what it’s small and minute, to the fragments of immanent truth disseminated in the physical and emotional universe.............. It is dissolution of the rational and theoretical knowledge, recognition of its impossibility of true understanding, for an experimentation of life voluntarily adrift.............»
«Lightness is against every certainty, it’s relativity, it’s trust in the natural flow of the life and spontaneous adaptation to its course................. it’s my Messianic message, powerful antidote against every weight and gravity......… ».
About the sculpture Manni has choosen an artistic run, next to the public aspect. She realized in various countries of the world, infact, numerous public monumental sculptures, primarily in stainless steel, with a careful sensibility to the local cultural aspect with which she conversed also communicating personal visions and concepts.
Her sculptures reflect on our contemporaneity or they communicate concepts and emotions related to the roots of the existence, to the vital energy in its endless demonstrations, drawing inspiration from the natural world or from the personal life, combining different techniques and materials in a wish of continuous experimentation.
About her predilection towards the stainless steel as material for the creations, Manni writes:
« I love this material because its use is relatively recent in the Art history and it is, therefore, a new material that leaves space for the experimentation. A work realized in stainless steel immediately places itself in the sphere of the “contemporary”, and, as visual impact, is well adaptable to the urban spaces and the architectures of our time. I believe that this material is one among the most suitable to interpret our historical moment, that inclines more and more toward the “artificial. I use the stainless steel to speak about this, about an artificiality that advances, about the human condition in an epoch of globalization where everything races fast and life is anywhere regulated by models of behaviors and stereotyped objectives. I use the strength of this material to speak about constraint and possible liberation, I use the elegance of its light as metaphor of a deceptive world made of appearance, that attracts and at the same time it imprisons.
From a technical point of view, to work with the scarce flexibility of the steel always represents for me a challenge to elaborate solutions and new methods, a challenge to give an organic soul to this cold and enough rigid material. The first instinct for me is always that to destroy the linearity and the compactness of a steel plate dividing it in pieces. I find that the small pieces are more human and that it is easier to converse with them recomposing other forms. I love, then, the light of the steel and the possibility to play with its reflecting quality in different ways and measures and I love its eternity……the stainless steel it is forever ».
The monumental aspect of the sculptures and their public character allowed the artist to reach, besides specific technical competences of realization, a code of expressive language that departing from the personal area also opens to vast possibility of reading.
The relationship with the public in her actions of performance is also fundamental, for an Art that can warmly weigh on the social context.
The performances-shows that Manni proposes with the theatrical company "La Zattera", as perfomer for the bodily movement and choreographer, are highly spectacular events in which the public, directly involved in the actions, is dragged in an atmosphere of strong emotional impact.
In their representation, the performers use sophisticated audio-scenic effects interacting with powerful scenographies and self-motion electromechanical cranes which adapt actions to fantastic musical sculptures or musical bases written on purpose..
The monumental character of the elements of scene, the use of special and pyrotechnic effects and the music, at the time same industrialist and ancestral, electronics and primitive, create in the performances an atmosphere of strong suggestion and involvement, sustaining the treatment of themes related to the relationship of the man and his body with the technology and with the today's existential space.
For Manni the theatrical performance represents the only form of expression where it is truly possible to accomplish a Global Art, where though can coincide with the action and theater with life itself.
The thetre becomes a space physical and metaphisical at once , in which one can represent and free modern man'ES , modern man having his passions and fears , limits and contradictions, desires and conflicts , in the further attempt to operate a historical and anthropological reading on it.
It is for this reason that in the peformances physicalness is very emphasized , which is not only evidence of the human existential condition , but also active presence used to shake the public didactically from its corporal passivity in the attempt to exorcise a complete destitution of the body as a gnostic and communicative instrument.
In this perspective, the concept of dance assumes a central role, whereas this term means not only the various forms of dance, but, on the contrary, every sequence of free actions, which is the result and the demonstration of a symbiosis between body and mind.
And it is also through this free language of the body, that the audience is itself truly involved and physically invaded by the actions, so that on a corporal level the contrast between one's own passivity and the constructive activism of the artists might be more easily perceived and also more stimulant.
What the artist wants to provoke in the spectators during the performance is in reality, in fact, first of all, a stimulation of the emotions and of the body's sensitive capacities so that there might remain a physical memory, which is often more important and incisive than rational memory.
The sort of questions which no doubt the performances arouse on a rational level remain , in fact , generally wanting of an immediate answer and real understanding , but body preserves the memory of that experience and this is in some cases sufficient to be intimately able to bring about a process of deeper mutations and confrontations which might then give rise to concrete and significant changes in readings and behaviour.
The possibility of generating that spark that might be able to start off such a process is the driving spirit of every single performance and whole reason for it existence.
For its public character, also Scenography represents for Manni a sustainable compromise to finance her own artistic search. Even if remaining in a decorative circle, the planning and the realization of vast set designs have, in fact, permitted to the artist to experiment and to appraise the qualities of a vast range of materials and to take familiarity with global interventions in big spaces and their public.
Warm and exotic atmospheres, settings where real space is projected in a future dimension, are settled as new ways of living. Manni creates "places to live” with a dimension for escape and travel, being always aware of their functional needs. Sculptress and painter, she uses for the realization of her works very different materials and technical solutions, always new and innovative. She combines wisely the usage of metals with fantasy and skill in manipulating scenography works with other combined materials like gypsum, concrete, resins, polysterol, wood, fabrics.
As far as painting is concerned her skills range from a refined trompe l’oeil to metropolitan graffiti, abstract surfaces, figurative elements. She, also, proposes a large range of artistic solutions in wall coating and covering.
The production of literary texts makes part, instead, of an innate expressive practice of the artist, since the infancy. Poetic notes, autobiographic fragments, stories, accompany the flow of her life and works, like an outside voice following the events and maintaining an own autonomy of language and judgment.
