There is no there—Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano
Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano’s collaborative video works explore the relationship of the body with material objects, space and time. Their works emphasise improvisation, process, gesture and the sculptural.
There is no there, 2015, was inspired by the early Soviet Union Blue Blouse theatre collective (1924–32), an influential troupe established under the auspices of the Moscow School of Journalism, that created a type of performance called ‘Living Newspapers’ based on topical news events. Each performance, while designed to entertain, had a political message, which expressed the opinions of the Soviet regime to the working class and reinforced the power of the collective. In There is no there, the Manganos extend their concept of performance to a form of community engagement whereby fellow artists, friends and colleagues enact a series of movements and postures inspired by recent media coverage that wordlessly communicate degrees of urgency, anxiety, enquiry and stillness.
The written word, early 20th century feminism and the power of the collective also inform the Manganos’ most recent work: the three-channel video When mountains move which evolved from an artist residency at the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre in Japan in mid-2018 and is shown in Australia for the first time at Geelong Gallery.
When mountains move is inspired by a poem by Akiko Yosano published in the first edition of feminist magazine Seitō (Bluestocking) in 1911. Local Aomori women perform a series of choreographed movements that visually translate the poem across three screens representing written text, gesture as text (realised by the body), and landscape as text.
Events
Floortalk: There is no there—Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano
Saturday 15 December
For kids: Shadow tricks—Polyglot Theatre
Wednesday 23 January