Natacha Mankowski was born in 1986 in Paris. In 2011 she received her MA in Architecture from the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris. She received the Tony Garnier Prize in 2012. Coming from an architectural background, Natacha Mankowski aims to blur the traditional categories of representation of space. Her work, adapted into the diverse media of painting, installation and architecture, considers virtual and real space in terms of science and experience. Natacha Mankowski has been included in important exhibitions including 104 Manifeste at 104, Paris, East River at Gallery MC, New York, as well as Berlin Art Week.
In her residency project, titled “The Real Tour”, Natacha Mankowski creates a large-scale painting that represents the Brooklyn Navy Yard and allows visitors to move about a hybrid “real-virtual” space. The project investigates the use of virtual spaces, developing new representative methods that blur the interactions between the virtual and the real space, while recalling the first use of the “virtual tour”. Rather than mapping a real space into a virtual world, Mankowski recreates the real space of the Navy Yard in the real setting of The Watermill Center. Through this large-scale painting, Mankwoski reconstitutes the possibilities of the virtual tour, creating a more immersive experience of space in which the spectator would discover the mechanisms at play in augmented reality. Reversing the mapping of real worlds in a virtual space, Mankowski develops virtual worlds in a real space, allowing visitors to speculate on various scenarios in the hypothetical past, present, and future of the hybrid space. Throughout the project, Mankowski develops hybrid objects, spaces, or images that stand in between these two realities, creating for instance “real-virtual materials” or “moving walls”. When entering the space, the visitor becomes a one-day archaeologist, speculating on various scenarios and entering the hypothetical past, present, and future of the Navy Yard.