Inferno

War and power have been recurring theme in Manuela's practice. During the Iraq war she was particularly concerned with the meaning of words such as ‘war’ and ‘peace’, and the different roles played out by ‘women’ and men’ in war time. In her work she questioned weather and why we, as individuals, are capable of such acts, Although we may recoil in horror at newspaper reports of atrocities carried out by human beings upon each other in the name of ‘war’. If we are the rational beings we often define ourselves as, why do we continue to repeat the same fruitless patterns?
To explore these themes she uses photography, turning the media itself on its head, by deconstructing the conventional photographic form through the manipulation, cutting, bending and knitting of images to take the photograph beyond its traditional two-dimensional confines.