As part of the exhibition Broken, Mark Manders presents Silent Studio (Reduced to 88%), a large-scale installation that transforms the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi into what Manders himself describes as a “temporary outdoor studio.” Following the opening, Manders sat down with Daniel Breuer to discuss his use of deliberate non-finito, writing with objects as opposed to words, and how the fragment shapes his ever-expanding conceptual self-portrait.

In your previous works, you have followed a set of rules or guidelines while creating the artwork. Did you establish any specific guidelines or new rules for Silent Studio (Reduced to 88%)?

This work, Tilted Head, appears as if it’s made from clay. When I started working on it, I asked the question: what is the most fundamental material a human can work with to make an image of another human or to make an image of an animal? I felt that this is the most primitive display. If I make a figure, I cannot simply choose colour because it has to be like the real material. Of course, the work is painted, but it looks like clay. For me, that’s really important, because clay is the most primitive material you can work with.

There are other sculptures on display in the Broken exhibition where the material used is incongruous with the material that appears to be used. Roman sculptors, for example, often polished marble extensively to simulate ivory. This is a case of trying, deceptively, to make a sculpture appear more luxurious or decadent, whereas you seem to be doing the opposite. You’re disguising your material to make it seem more primitive.

Yes, but to me, there is also something else. I make it in a material that seems as if somebody has just made it. It appears here like somebody didn’t finish and just left.

You talk about how you wanted to be a writer, and now you’re using objects to write. When one looks at your work, I think from an immediate point of view, it might look quite serious and austere. Today, on the surface, this huge half-destroyed head in the courtyard of such a grand space appears rather grandiose and noble. But I think with your work, especially with the newspapers featured in this piece, there is such humour and absurdity to it. When I was reading the crosswords you wrote, which are just complete nonsense, I was laughing. The concept of sitting down and making an unsolvable crossword is very silly and hilarious to me. Do you also find humour in your work?

Absolutely, yes, I'm very happy in my studio. I’m very optimistic. I work on many works at once, and I have the feeling that they will all be good, although they always kind of fail. But one day they will be good. It is something so beautiful that it’s still possible after all these years of evolution. We still have this possibility of making an object that can speak for a few seconds and stay with you forever.

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That’s a very beautiful way of putting it. There are definitely “serious” works of art that can stay with you forever that are also tongue in cheek and playful. There is a lineage of artists throughout all types of mediums who I feel get painted with a serious brush but in reality have a real zest and ebullience for life and laughter. Like Beckett, who is a capital S serious writer, but whose books often make me laugh my head off.

Yes, absolutely. And he also had so much fun. It’s so much fun to be an artist, it is the best job possible. Although I don’t cure people and I cannot do operations, I hope if people see the joy and find joy in my work then it can be some kind of positive. I really believe in art.

Tilted Head can be interpreted as either being in the process of being made or halfway through being destroyed. This ambiguous state or conceptual purgatory is also evident in dust, which you used in the installation: dust is evidence of both time passing and of something being created. Is the tension of ambiguous and contrasting timelines an important concept for you?

The Broken show at Palazzo Stozzi is so rich and layered. It is very interesting how the idea of fragmentation relates to violence and time, to natural accidents or consent. My work is fragmented because I decided to leave in mid-process.

The ‘nonsense’ newspapers are frozen in a time that can’t be attributed to any specific period. Does the ambiguous nature of an artwork mean a lot to you when you are creating it?

The reason that I started making these newspapers is because I was not allowed to use real newspapers in my work. Some years ago, I needed some pieces of a newspaper for a work with papier-mache but I got stuck. I couldn’t use a normal newspaper because my work is frozen in time. It is frozen in one big now, so for me, it is not possible to use a daily newspaper that is linked to a certain date and place.

I had to make a newspaper that is timeless, and one of the solutions was to create this newspaper with all existing words. Every word is used just once, all in a random order. I started my work as a poet, and step by step I started to write with objects. Now I do not write “chair”; I make a chair and use the real thing.

At the age of eighteen, when I was considering becoming an artist, writer, or psychiatrist, I was really fascinated by books written in the first person. It is unbelievably interesting how a first-person narrator can pull you into an inner world, allowing you to think and feel alongside someone who does not really exist, but who has been constructed in such a way that they touch vital aspects of our own lives.

It was then that I decided to write with objects instead of words. Over the course of our evolution, a deep and special relationship has slowly emerged between things, objects and architecture and how they relate to how we think and feel. My plan was to spend my life working on a book, not a written book or novel, but a vast, static yet ever-expanding three-dimensional stage one could literally walk through. A building that seems abandoned, in which the actions and thoughts of the narrator have crystallised into a cohesive whole. Just like in a novel.

When I began, I was, and still am, deeply grateful to be alive, to be able to live for a short while. It strikes me how I, and the people around me, handle life itself and relate to the realisation of how ephemeral life is. I’m also interested in the strength and vulnerability of human thought. In how we, as thinking individuals, remain susceptible to logical fallacies and neuroses, and open to hope as well. It is from a sense of gratitude that I try to capture, or to freeze, as many thoughts as possible in my life. Not because I consider myself so remarkable. But because I think it’s remarkable that I exist. It is quite amazing that, as an artist, you can make something a viewer needs to see for only a few seconds in order to carry it in their mind, even for decades. A static image can have tremendous power and can therefore be a connecting factor. Even stronger is when multiple static images can be arranged in dialogue, like words in a sentence.

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Mark Manders was born in 1968 in Volkel, Netherlands, and currently lives and works in Ronse, Belgium.

Daniel Breuer is a writer and filmmaker based in London.

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