Las Flores al Cielo, by Maness

is an immersive Imaginarium consisting of sculptures, paintings, scent, and pieces of creative writing. Maness presents an atemporal recollection of a formative childhood memory through multiple storylines, inviting viewers to elaborate their own retellings of the tale, based on their subjective realities. The exhibition presents a narrative built from three distinct stories which occur in different times and places – Mexico City in the mid-1950s and the early 1990s, and Berlin in 2020 and 2021. In September 1991, Maness’ father suffered an accident upon returning home from a film production’s wrap party. The then assistant director slipped on one of his children’s misplaced toys, and fell to the ground as he came out of the shower, landing on his temple. He sustained injuries of varying degrees, such as a severe concussion; an open, gushing wound, a brief shock.

The production in question was a biographical film of actress Miroslava Stern. Considered one of the most important figures of Mexican cinema, the artist of Czechoslovakian origin garnered international acclaim by the age of 30, by then known simply as Miroslava. Her last project, directed by Luis Buñuel, was titled ‚Rehearsal For A Murder‘. The 1955 film featured an almost premonitory last scene, in which the body of Miroslava’s character is cremated following her passing. This would also be her tragic fate off the silver screen, as she committed suicide just weeks after filming concluded.

In 2020, Maness brought one of his father’s old film scripts from Mexico City to Berlin, after his death the previous year. The artist sat with his mother discussing the script, which his father used as an infallible compass for his work as assistant director on Miroslava’s biographical film. During this conversation, it is revealed that the story about the misplaced toy bore little resemblance to the events that actually transpired that evening of September, 1991. It is the mosaic of these three narratives from which the exhibition develops. Cinematographic moments are intertwined with surrealism and magical realism. Substance abuse; bathrooms, child’s play, and the theatre of love and death, all presented in parallel, give us our cue in the role of external observers to the story of a solitary author, who writes time and again of an event inevitably with the same result - the death of the main character. Raising lucid questions about time, narrative duality, and the often imperceptible difference between fact and fiction, the exhibition allows us to yield, if only for a second, to the temptation to believe in the imaginary.