Manuel Scano Larrazàbal was born in Padua in 1981 to a Venezuelan mother and Sardinian father. He spent his childhood in Caracas from 1983 to 1992 before returning to Italy along with his family after the coup of Hugo Chavez. He attended the Accademia di Belle Arti of Brera then participated in workshops with international artists and curators including the Fondazione Spinola Banna and the Fondazione Antonio Ratti. In November 2011, in Turin, he took part in a one-week cohabitation planed by Roberto Cuoghi and Gian Antonio Gilli.

While we were hiking through the woods, it occurred to me to ask Manuel if he saw this work as a self-portrait. Like a forest, it invites to be considered a whole. It is composed of seemingly autonomous parts that ultimately are co-dependent, albeit in indirect, oblique ways. It forms a system but a peculiarly open one, in which the line between « internal » and « external » influences (the artist and the engine, the trees and the wind) is so thin as to appear nonexistent. It creates art.
« You’re right, it is a kind of self-portrait », Manuel said while we hiked. « But what is a self? »

From a conversation with Vinccenzo Latronico

manuel scano