The visitor lands in a dark environment with slightly spooky sounds. The eyes are first drawn to a “living chessboard”. It is interactive, and reminds us of the choices we make in life. Chess is a strategic war game--so we asked Manga her about her feelings on the fight for survival. She says: “ Life is a fight, yes, but not only between bad and good, a fight of our duality, our strengths and weaknesses, our beliefs and our doubts, it is more a fight of the mind than values. The path of our life is determined by our decisions, as well as the events which happens to us.” We walk on and hear the sounds, which are somewhere between frightening and humorous. Manga smiles: “I’m not a musician, it was the biggest challenge here, I tried to create a musical path.” The music enhances the slightly dark mood of the installation. We walk up stairs made of bones: “The bones are material, we are made of flesh and bones, we rarely see them. It is most disgusting to most of us, maybe because it tells us about what our body is, a machine. Here we face it, it’s what we are. If you look at the dancing women here, they have skeleton on their skins, it’s an inverted reality; the negative image of ourselves.” Manga hopes that the visitors see not only the dark side of her work, but also the brightness--the end is inevitable, whatever we do, so why not enjoy life as it is? Manga says: ”Death is the main subject of my installation, dead and alive dance together, it’s like a summoning, as if death is not the end of things but part of life. I
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tried to smooth the line between death and life, the skeletal women have a deathly appearance but they are dancing like living creatures. Death is here aesthetic, not an ugly thing we have to fear. It’s not to take in the historical stories as it was a warning to frighten people... living is fighting always to survive. At the end, a mystery; what will remain of us, what will we pass on, what will go? Some people transform our history in bad or good, they didn’t lose anything, they transformed. Death isn’t the fate to me, but the time we spend living is, what are we doing of our lives, do we reach our personal goals? We have our lives in our hands, we aren’t puppets, we are able to progress, to change, to modify our consciousness; we have a life to improve.” The French artist works on improving her own life in real life and in Second Life. She is grateful for getting the chance of placing her installation at Split Screen, owned by Dividni Shostakovich: “Things go very smoothly, Dividni was very clear about the organization and so it was very comfortable to work here, I feel very free to use the space as I wish. He’s always here to answer to me quickly and to add precisions. This is the first time I work at split screen and I’m very happy about it. Split screen is a good way for artists to exhibit, we have a space, we deal with it, it’s clear and neat, I like that.” Manga is not yet a professional artist in real life, but has plans for the future: “I used to draw and paint a lot. Less since I discovered digital