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?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\nI don\u2019t think it\u2019s possible to separate them. Ever. The artist isn\u2019t a role I play: it\u2019s my way of looking at the world. There isn\u2019t a private Mandra and an artist Mandra. There is one single person who moves through life with curiosity, desire, and wonder. Maybe that\u2019s where art is born: in the way one inhabits the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/kulaberlin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/mandra-stella-cerrone-820x1024.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n- Mandra Cerrone<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
02 \u2014 Beneath the Surface<\/h3>\n\n\n\nLooking 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?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\nI 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\u2019t enough for me. I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
03 \u2014 What We Inherit<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThis is one of the fundamental questions of my research. We are born inside a story we didn\u2019t 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\u2019t erasing what we\u2019ve received, but looking at it, recognizing it, and deciding what to do with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/kulaberlin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/sine-nomine-1-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n04 \u2014 Silent Family<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
In Silent Family<\/em>, 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nI don\u2019t bring my own biography onto the stage: the device is mine, the process belongs to whoever takes part. But I couldn\u2019t have built a space like Silent Family, with its fourteen models available for people to arrange their own family portrait, if I hadn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
05 \u2014 What the Body Knows<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe body doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t represent, it acts. That\u2019s why I work on the real gesture, not on narration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/kulaberlin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/denaro-santo.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n06 \u2014 Love Is a Confession<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
In Love Is a Confession<\/em>, you perform an extremely simple yet powerful gesture: you \u201cbreak\u201d 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThere\u2019s always a threshold moment, a breath before. It isn\u2019t fear of the gesture itself, it\u2019s 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\u2019t disappear: she puts herself at the service of the gesture, becomes the hand that carries out what the rite requires. That\u2019s the moment the artist expresses herself most fully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
07 \u2014 Care as a Poetic Act<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
You have often described your performances as \u201cpoetic acts.\u201d That feels more intimate than the word performance. What does it mean to take care of a person while inviting them into an artwork?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nAbove 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\u2019t 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\u2019s place. That\u2019s what I mean by \u201cpoetic act\u201d: it doesn\u2019t just narrate an action, it also carries the responsibility of whoever generates it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/kulaberlin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/corpo-a-corpo-memorie-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n08 \u2014 When the Work Answers Back<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYes. And it\u2019s 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\u2019t know what will happen in the other person. Sometimes a word, a gesture, a look opens up a possibility you hadn\u2019t foreseen. And that\u2019s exactly where the work keeps transforming, for me too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
09 \u2014 Transforming Pain<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2014 knowledge, imagination, even beauty?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt 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\u2019s in the symbolic gesture, really carried out, that pain begins to become something else. Beauty isn\u2019t a decoration of pain: it\u2019s an essential part of its transformation. The expansion of consciousness carries beauty within it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/kulaberlin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/studio-mystic-driver-art-lab.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n10 \u2014 What Is Love?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nLove isn\u2019t chosen: it happens. And if it finds you worthy, it leaves nothing as it was before, it\u2019s as final as death. I\u2019m 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\u2019s the Love I mean: something you don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
11 \u2014 Genealogical Love<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
In Genealogical Love<\/em>, 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe boundary lies in the truth of the use. A rite, a symbol, a word doesn\u2019t lose its power when used outside its original context: it\u2019s the truth with which it\u2019s 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<\/p>\n\n\n\n
appropriate her pain, but to give her back her own material, transformed into a poetic act.12 \u2014 Being a Woman<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/kulaberlin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/mandra-stella-cerrone.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
- \n
- Mandra Cerrone<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
02 \u2014 Beneath the Surface<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t enough for me. I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
03 \u2014 What We Inherit<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is one of the fundamental questions of my research. We are born inside a story we didn\u2019t 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\u2019t erasing what we\u2019ve received, but looking at it, recognizing it, and deciding what to do with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n04 \u2014 Silent Family<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
In Silent Family<\/em>, 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t bring my own biography onto the stage: the device is mine, the process belongs to whoever takes part. But I couldn\u2019t have built a space like Silent Family, with its fourteen models available for people to arrange their own family portrait, if I hadn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
05 \u2014 What the Body Knows<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
The body doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t represent, it acts. That\u2019s why I work on the real gesture, not on narration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n06 \u2014 Love Is a Confession<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
In Love Is a Confession<\/em>, you perform an extremely simple yet powerful gesture: you \u201cbreak\u201d 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s always a threshold moment, a breath before. It isn\u2019t fear of the gesture itself, it\u2019s 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\u2019t disappear: she puts herself at the service of the gesture, becomes the hand that carries out what the rite requires. That\u2019s the moment the artist expresses herself most fully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
07 \u2014 Care as a Poetic Act<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
You have often described your performances as \u201cpoetic acts.\u201d That feels more intimate than the word performance. What does it mean to take care of a person while inviting them into an artwork?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019s place. That\u2019s what I mean by \u201cpoetic act\u201d: it doesn\u2019t just narrate an action, it also carries the responsibility of whoever generates it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n08 \u2014 When the Work Answers Back<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yes. And it\u2019s 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\u2019t know what will happen in the other person. Sometimes a word, a gesture, a look opens up a possibility you hadn\u2019t foreseen. And that\u2019s exactly where the work keeps transforming, for me too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
09 \u2014 Transforming Pain<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2014 knowledge, imagination, even beauty?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s in the symbolic gesture, really carried out, that pain begins to become something else. Beauty isn\u2019t a decoration of pain: it\u2019s an essential part of its transformation. The expansion of consciousness carries beauty within it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n10 \u2014 What Is Love?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Love isn\u2019t chosen: it happens. And if it finds you worthy, it leaves nothing as it was before, it\u2019s as final as death. I\u2019m 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\u2019s the Love I mean: something you don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
11 \u2014 Genealogical Love<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
In Genealogical Love<\/em>, 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
The boundary lies in the truth of the use. A rite, a symbol, a word doesn\u2019t lose its power when used outside its original context: it\u2019s the truth with which it\u2019s 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<\/p>\n\n\n\n
appropriate her pain, but to give her back her own material, transformed into a poetic act.12 \u2014 Being a Woman<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n