Natalia Manta | Healing Weapons

What initiated this research was the notion of the use of tools and polymorphic instruments that humans invent in order to carry out an action. In this context, I attempted to create a series of sculptures that resemble both familiar tools and human organs. These objects occupy an ambiguous territory: functional yet organic, familiar yet strange, like hybrid forms between body and machine.

A key reference for the work was David Cronenberg’s film “Dead Ringers.” In the film, we follow two twin brothers, a doctor and his doppelgänger, who are gradually drawn into a mutually destructive relationship. Certain surgical tools that they invent themselves play a central role in this process. Although intended to heal, they ultimately turn into instruments of trauma. This reversal, the moment when the tool of healing becomes the instrument of injury, became a central thread in my thinking.

This idea was the center point around which the core thematic field of the body of work began to take shape: trauma and obsession. Obsession, as a motif that returns cyclically over time, seems to run through human lives across generations. As if it is passed on almost genetically, like an imperceptible trace of memory, from one generation to the next, even when we cannot locate its original source.

A large part of my research took place on site at Onassis Ready, where the building itself was a former factory for sealing large plastic containers. The idea of containment has always preoccupied me: how boxes, cabinets, and vessels are made that enclose matter, air, and memory. How these objects function as repositories of information, accumulating time and stories.

The wider area of the Agios Ioannis Rentis industrial zone turned into a map of exploration, almost an excavation site, in the sense archaeologists use to describe field research. From there, I began to gather elements: people’s narratives, small everyday stories, and archival records. Important in this process was my collaboration with Marianna Christofi, who provided me with material from the building’s archive, floor plans, and information about the area’s small workshops.

Most of these workshops operated as small family empires. People’s relationships were close but often rough as well. Their everyday life was inseparably tied to manual labor: tools, machines, and objects used continuously to produce something. This heterogeneous landscape of an industry in decline, at once familiar and strange, created in me a strong sense of dystopia. There was always something recognizable and something unsettling, almost nightmarish.

I began to call this feeling “Nightmares”: recurring patterns, intergenerational obsessions that appear again and again in different forms.

My relationship with archives—archaeology, excavation, lists of names and numbers, family albums—always coexists with another major interest: science fiction. As in Cronenberg’s film, something often transcends the human and serves as a metaphor for another horizon of time and space.

While searching for material between the old bazaar of Elaionas and small second-hand markets, I began collecting old videotapes of science-fiction animated works. This led to an unexpected meeting of two different lines: on one side, history, genealogy, and people’s personal records; on the other, an imaginary, almost animistic world of animated characters.

During the same period, in searching through my personal archive, I found myself once again confronted with my father’s strange contraptions. A physicist, he made them with methodical care and particular craftsmanship for the art he loved deeply: fishing. These objects were both tools for use and instruments of attack, hybrid constructions whose form fascinated me from childhood, long before I could fully understand how they worked.

This memory led to an earlier series of works, such as “Memorial Tools,” and ultimately became one of the paths that brought me to the “Healing Weapons” series. Here, the tools are transformed into aggressive instruments of healing, a paradoxical gesture that attempts to cure obsession through the trauma itself. In a way, it recalls Louise Bourgeois’ phrase: “I transform hate into love.”

Alongside the sculpted tools, I built an original analog kinetic mechanism. This mechanism produced heat, sound in the form of frequencies, a pulse through vibrating strings, and an uninterrupted circular motion from a motor that ran throughout the Open Days program. For me, this circular movement and the continuous sound metaphorically translated the sleep clock: the process of sinking into a nightmare and obsession.

During the presentation, I created an improvised questionnaire and placed it inside a hybrid toolbox for visitors. The questions they were asked to answer concerned personal experiences: whether they have nightmares, what they fear most, or which image they associate with their childhood. This process functioned as a form of on-site memory collection.

Almost by chance, during the same period, I discovered in my studio an old analog television with a VHS. When I tried to play one of the animation videotapes I had picked up, the device worked. The tape’s vibration and the ghostly images on the screen created an intense experience, like an opening onto a parallel timeline.

This whole system—sculptural tools, mechanisms, archives, and moving images—functions for me as a leap into imagination that ultimately returns to memory.

The “Healing Weapons” series remains in progress. In the next stage of the research, I focus on the idea of containment, creating six boxes that hold different Healing Weapons. Inside them, ready-made materials coexist with archival photographs of unknown families, personal narratives and objects, sculptural apparatuses and instruments. In parallel, analog VHS televisions, with a sonic hum, show processed material from animation and recorded images.

Gradually, all these elements form an installation in which memory, archive, machine, and imagination are connected into a single system, a system that attempts to map the paths of trauma, obsession, and the desire for healing.