The Art of the Poetic Act
In conversation with KULABERLIN, Italian artist and performer Mandra Cerrone speaks about her work: the body, family, money, love, and the inheritance we receive without having chosen it.
Cerrone constructs her works, which she calls “poetic acts”, at the intersection of art, psychomagic, metagenealogy and myth. She does not represent conflict: she physically manipulates it, giving it a gesture capable of containing it.
In this conversation, she shares for the first time and in such depth what it means to construct a device capable of physically transforming what is usually only narrated.
01 Who is Mandra?
Before we talk about your work, I would like to ask about you. Who is Mandra when she is not an artist? And how possible is it, for you, to separate the woman from the artist?
I don’t think it’s possible to separate them. Ever. The artist isn’t a role I play: it’s my way of looking at the world. There isn’t a private Mandra and an artist Mandra. There is one single person who moves through life with curiosity, desire, and wonder. Maybe that’s where art is born: in the way one inhabits the world.
- Mandra Cerrone
02 — Beneath the Surface
Looking at your work, I have the sense that you are less interested in what happens on the surface of life than in what remains beneath it: wounds, desires, invisible bonds, the things we inherit without choosing them. Where does this need to go so deeply come from?
I think it comes from a kind of restlessness, but also from a hunger for truth. The surface interests me, a great deal, aesthetically too, but it isn’t enough for me. I’ve always had the sense that visible reality was only the emerged part of something much larger. My work often consists of searching for an image capable of making that invisible part, that shadow zone, visible, and illuminating it.
03 — What We Inherit
Many of your works deal with family, memory and genealogy. How much of who we are truly belongs to us, and how much is something we have received, absorbed or inherited?
This is one of the fundamental questions of my research. We are born inside a story we didn’t choose. We receive names, expectations, fears, behaviors, silences, roles, even ideas about love and death. Part of us is inherited. But we are not condemned to genealogy. Genealogy can be a prison, or it can be material to transform. Freedom, for me, isn’t erasing what we’ve received, but looking at it, recognizing it, and deciding what to do with it.
04 — Silent Family
In Silent Family, you work precisely with this invisible dimension of family relationships. Was there something in your own personal history that you had to confront before you could speak so intimately about the histories of others?
I don’t bring my own biography onto the stage: the device is mine, the process belongs to whoever takes part. But I couldn’t have built a space like Silent Family, with its fourteen models available for people to arrange their own family portrait, if I hadn’t first gone through the effort of looking at my own family without turning away. That personal passage is the ground I build on, not the content I show.
05 — What the Body Knows
The body returns constantly in your work: as a place of memory, love and pain, but also as a possibility for transformation. What does the body know that the mind often refuses to know?
The body doesn’t lie. It already knows, before words, what weighs and what is missing. In my performances it is a threshold, a place of transit: it doesn’t represent, it acts. That’s why I work on the real gesture, not on narration.
06 — Love Is a Confession
In Love Is a Confession, you perform an extremely simple yet powerful gesture: you “break” a heart. What happens inside you in the seconds before such an action? Are you afraid? Do you hesitate? Or, in the moment of the action, does the artist disappear completely?
There’s always a threshold moment, a breath before. It isn’t fear of the gesture itself, it’s a precise physical action, a stone on an object, but the moment where imagination and action touch. For the unconscious, there is no difference between what is imagined and what is enacted. In that second, the artist doesn’t disappear: she puts herself at the service of the gesture, becomes the hand that carries out what the rite requires. That’s the moment the artist expresses herself most fully.
07 — Care as a Poetic Act
You have often described your performances as “poetic acts.” That feels more intimate than the word performance. What does it mean to take care of a person while inviting them into an artwork?
Above all it means not invading. I prepare a space, build a situation, bring in the symbols, and then accompany. I try not to be directive. I don’t bring people into a risk, but into a possibility. Taking care, on stage, means staying present enough to support, and stepping back enough not to decide in the other person’s place. That’s what I mean by “poetic act”: it doesn’t just narrate an action, it also carries the responsibility of whoever generates it.
08 — When the Work Answers Back
In your work, the audience is not simply watching. They are involved, listened to, brought into relationship. Has someone ever given you something during a work that you yourself were not yet ready to see?
Yes. And it’s one of the most beautiful things that can happen in a relational work. When you work with people you have to accept losing control over the piece. You can build a precise structure, but you can’t know what will happen in the other person. Sometimes a word, a gesture, a look opens up a possibility you hadn’t foreseen. And that’s exactly where the work keeps transforming, for me too.
09 — Transforming Pain
Your work often seems to begin with a wound, but it never remains there. It searches for transformation. What has to happen for pain to become something other than pain — knowledge, imagination, even beauty?
It has to be gone through, looked at, transformed. In my work I try to take something formless, a wound, a loss, a conflict, a desire, and give it a gesture, an image, a rite, a form that can hold it. Pain that is enacted , composed, detached, washed, broken, recomposed, finds a different way out than ordinary language. It’s in the symbolic gesture, really carried out, that pain begins to become something else. Beauty isn’t a decoration of pain: it’s an essential part of its transformation. The expansion of consciousness carries beauty within it.
10 — What Is Love?
You have worked extensively with the subject of love. Yet in your work, love never appears simply as romance. It is memory, dependence, inheritance, loss, desire and responsibility. What is love to you now, after everything you have lived through?
Love isn’t chosen: it happens. And if it finds you worthy, it leaves nothing as it was before, it’s as final as death. I’m not talking about romantic love, love between siblings, or family love. For a psychomagic action I asked fifty people to write me a letter of recommendation addressed to Love, as if it were an institution I was applying to be hired by. That’s the Love I mean: something you don’t earn through relationship, but that you present yourself for, apply for, hope to be found worthy of. When it arrives, it illuminates. It makes you wise. An experience that goes beyond you.
11 — Genealogical Love
In Genealogical Love, the individual story of a woman becomes something larger: a reflection on violence, family memory and the feminine. Where do you see the boundary between someone’s personal history and the artist’s responsibility to transform it into a work?
The boundary lies in the truth of the use. A rite, a symbol, a word doesn’t lose its power when used outside its original context: it’s the truth with which it’s used that produces the poetic act. Genealogical Love was born from research on femicide: I was analyzing the relationship between victim and perpetrator, what in their stories had brought them together, hooked them to each other. No man came forward to stage his own family relationships. So I worked only with the material of a woman who had survived violence, building a device close, in form, to family constellations. My responsibility was not to
appropriate her pain, but to give her back her own material, transformed into a poetic act.12 — Being a Woman
Has being a woman changed the way you look, create and move through the world? And is there something you would say today, as an adult woman and an artist, to the girl you once were?
I’d tell her I love her. She wanted guides, teachers, precious lessons. She found them, formed friendships and alliances with them, transformed herself. A permanent revolution. In the beginning I used to say of myself: “I am a solitary traveler, walking little-trodden paths.” And I saw myself in Alejandra Pizarnik: “I am like the silent, starry night.” I change every day, but I have an unchanging essence I recognize myself in. Being a woman has shaped a great deal of my experience of the world. I’ve learned to trust intuition, feeling, that knowledge that arrives before words.
13 — Desire
You once wrote that desire is the source of creativity. What does Mandra Cerrone desire today? Has that desire changed since you began this journey?
Desire isn’t the source of creativity: it’s what ignites it. De-sidera, the lack of stars, the tension toward what one doesn’t yet have, is the very material of art. In the beginning I mainly wanted to find my language. Today I want to carry it further: to find ever more precise forms for what I’m searching for, and to have the courage to be radical without becoming self-referential. And today I want that language to become an inheritance: something others can pick up, transform, and make their own.
14 — Feeling Completely Alive
Is there a moment in your life when you felt completely alive? Not necessarily a major event. It could be a tiny moment that nobody else would have considered important.
I don’t know how to answer. They’re very small moments. Walking on a sunny day and feeling, for no apparent reason, that I’m well. Feeling that I’m inside an incredibly beautiful moment. Or when, in a gesture, I catch the essence of another person. It happens like that, inexplicably, sometimes.
15 — The Island of Solitude
And then there is solitude. An important part of your practice seems to emerge from silence and inner listening. Has solitude been a wound, a necessity or a form of freedom for you?
I think it’s been all three, at different times. In the work it’s above all a necessity: without silence, there’s no listening to what precedes language, and without that listening, no symbol capable of truly speaking is born. Silence characterizes much of my work and presupposes an inner life, a space of freedom. Today I think of solitude as an island.
“Beloved solitude, blessed island.” — Franco Battiato, Amata solitudine
16 — Doubt
You continue to question yourself. You once said, “I constantly doubt myself.” Is that still true? And if so, do you think doubt is a weakness of the artist or one of her greatest strengths?
It’s still true. And today I believe more and more that doubt is a strength, not a weakness. I ask myself whether what I’m doing is necessary, what it adds to my life and to others’, whether it can spark a change, clarify something, or simply warm someone’s heart. Doubt keeps me from repeating gestures that have become automatic, emptied of truth. So yes, I doubt. But I also work while doubting.
17 — Disturbing Consensus
You have described the artist as someone capable of altering our vision of things, almost a researcher, a visionary, even a subversive. What do you think art still needs the courage to disturb today?
Consensus. Art should have the courage to disturb what we’ve learned to accept as normal, natural, inevitable. Conformism, worn-out images, our own convictions. And above all, passivity, that’s why I work with performance: it’s the one form that truly moves the subject from a passive position to a creative one, in the body, in real time. A thorn in the side of the established order, because it questions what is taken for granted and opens the possibility of imagining and acting differently.
18 — Presence as Resistance
We live in a time when everything is displayed, shared and consumed at extraordinary speed. You ask people instead for presence, listening, vulnerability and time. Could returning to intimacy be a form of rebellion today?
Yes. Rebellion is presence. Stopping, listening, truly looking at the other and truly looking at oneself. In a world that constantly wants us elsewhere, giving time and attention to what’s happening is an act of resistance. Maybe of intimacy too.
19 — I Want Something to Happen to You
If you could meet someone entering one of your works for the first time, what would you want to happen inside them? Not what should they understand, but what would you want them to feel?
I’d want something to happen to them. When I try out on myself an act that I later propose to others, often through that gesture I finally see something that was already right in front of me, but that I wasn’t conscious of. It’s a kind of illumination: a light turning on. I’d want that to happen to whoever enters one of my works too. Not that they understand something, but that they feel in their body that, for the duration of the gesture, something has moved. And I’d want that act to keep working even after the performance, even without me. Even just a little.
20 — Nothing Is Off Limits
After all these years, is there still something you are afraid to confront through art? Something you feel close to but have not yet had the courage to transform into a work?
No. In art I know no limits: reckless in psychic experimentation, but cautious and respectful only toward the body. The territories I don’t know are the ones that attract me most. If anything, what’s left is a question, not a fear: what happens to a work when it’s no longer only mine?
21 — Without the Word “Art”
If, for a moment, we removed the word “art” completely from our vocabulary, what would be the most important question you are trying to live today?
How much of my life is already a poetic act, and how much is still waiting to become one?
22 — Make Mistakes
What would you say to a young artist who feels she has something to say but is afraid of exposing herself, being judged or simply failing to find her place in the art world?
I’d tell her: get it wrong. Make a mess, start ten things and finish none of them, it’s there, in imperfection, that a path opens that no one has already mapped out for you. Whoever seeks only order eventually stops searching. They become disciplined, predictable, obedient to something that is no longer their own desire.
23 — One Sentence
If you could leave one sentence for the young women artists who come after you, what would it be?
Have the courage to follow what you cannot yet explain.
24 — Wine or Beer?
And finally, a much simpler question, almost domestic: wine or beer?
Wine, preferably red, drunk slowly and with someone worth talking to.
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Original Interview in original language:
Es befinden sich keine Produkte im Warenkorb. 