from the original Festival website:

“I’ve always being interested in investigating the notion of ‘Representation”.

The human body has always been my main subject and photography my dearest instrument.

For several years I have been collaborating with the most inspiring artists and I witness desire and commitment. I want to feel close to the artists I admire… I want to become an image.”

Manuel Vason’s fascination for the human body found its best manifestation when associated with the notion of Performance. His work could be viewed as a series of studies on the possibilities of the human body’s expression. Since 1999 his work has been published by Art Forum, ID, Dazed and Confused, Flash Art, Art Review, Frieze, Contemporary, Tate Magazine. His exhibition Pure Collaborations was a National Review of Live Art commission in 2006. 

Biography – updated 2020 – Manuel Vason (b.1974) is a transdisciplinary artist interested in questioning the role of the professional photographer in an image-driven contemporary society. By exploring the correspondence between the art of photographing and the art of performing, Vason is shaping a hybrid art form and a fertile space of critique and creative engagement. During the last twenty years he has collaborated with more than two hundred and fifty international performance artists, produced six publications and exhibited internationally.

In 2019, Vason completed a PhD by Publication at the University for the Creative Arts (UK).

notable projects:

The PhotoPerformer (2014, on going): The name of Manuel’s alter-ego. The aim of this project is to merge photography and performance into a hybrid cross-practice through which to further expose, deconstruct and transform his predominant, white, male, privileged perspective.

Double Exposures (2012 – 2015): A new collaborative venture between Manuel and forty-five of the most visually arresting artists working with performance in the UK. For Double Exposures, he has worked with two groups of artists, using two distinct types of collaboration, to produce a series of diptychs.

Becoming an Image (2013, on going): Manuel’s first body of work, which rather than emerging from a series of collaborations with individual artists, develops out of a group environment in which he leads collaborative actions. The point of departure is the concept of the Art of Exchange. The images produced become a skin with which to cover surfaces and three-dimensional objects.

I Believe in (2010, on going): A project exploring faith as an agent for artistic creation. The project focuses on the liminal space between the fictional and the real, the virtual and the performed fantasy.

STILL_MOVIL (2008-11): Manuel’s first collection of co-creations with 45 choreographers, dancers and movement practitioners. Working with artists across South America the project explores stillness as a durational space in which choreographed movements translate into poses. Each image was conceived as a new contemporary dance piece.

Encounters (2002-07): Manuel’s second extensive collection of photographic collaborations with artists working in Performance. Through extensive dialogue-based modes of collaboration, beautifully stylized and vividly constructed images question relations and boundaries between the documentation and artwork, body and space, time and memory.

Exposures (2000-2002): Manuel’s first collection of collaborative photographs with nineteen of the most acclaimed and controversial practitioners in Britain in the early 2000s: artists who were disrupting the norm, breaking the rules and provoking debate by exposing the body in all its diversities, difficulties and desires.

Live Gallery (1999-2003): Manuel’s first project which led him to transform a photographic session into a public performance. A site-specific project that took place within different communities and locations and provoked members of the public to perform an action in front a 10 x 8 inches Polaroid camera. The resultant images where immediately displayed as a temporary exhibition.

manuelvason.com