Table of Contents
Second Life and Real Life artist Milena Carbone first registered with SL on June 22, 2019.
An artist who´s life is all about art.
Her fields of inspiration are mainly science, psychology, philosophy, religions, and I would also include politics because of her statements about the climate problem and other topics with which she deals in general.
In her work she expresses the deepest feelings, fears, anger, friendships and despair.
Milena presents photography, to which she also adds appropriate stories so that she doesn’t necessarily see herself as a photographer, but rather as a storyteller.
Full of ideas and without following certain rules, she expresses values in her work.
Depending on which topic is moving you and how strong the inner urge is to express her feelings and of course always paying attention to many small details and the quality of the work, she create and transform her vision into photography and words.
She feels called to what she does, and she always give her best to make our and her own world better, or to make us all aware of a topic.
Milena’s favorite artist is Banksy, Van Goog’s “La Nuit Etoilée” left permanent traces in her artistic presence.
Vivian Maier’s photography inspires her and she is very impressed by the philosopher Simone Weil.
Basically, as she says, she admires people who live behind the scenes.
I personally, got to know Milena as a highly motivated person.
She is very enthusiastic about things that move her, goal-oriented and very often withdrawn in her creative world.
Milena’s work is very complex, as her pictures are part of a story that she shares with us in her exhibitions.
Nevertheless, and regardless of presented stories, there is always enough free space for the viewer for their own interpretations.
Milena is a reserved person, very friendly, a young and yet very serious person, enthusiastic, credible and convincing.
Riding Milena’s *stories*, they all have a strong foundation and are deeply rooted – sometimes unexpectedly heavy and deep going, but diverse and often alarming for our attention.
In my opinion, Milena is one of those artists who always try to inspire us to dialogue, to create madness and thus to provoke clarity.
The artist as Milena, often bring colors into an empty frame that we sometimes feel inside ourselves on certain topics.
Artist as she is give a voice to people who are normally not noticed or heard, and many times they manage to draw our attention to a certain situation.
I would like to end a short presentation with a quote:
“Art, freedom and creativity will change society faster than politics.” by Victor Pinchuk
Milena,
Your life without art would be …
Milena: No life. I couldn’t survive.
Where do you get your inspiration from?
Milena: I don’t know. I’m enthusiastic. Etymologically “enthusiasm” means having “God inside”.
Inspiration is out of control, I let it go and “it” shows up. Probably I am not an artist, but inspired.
The fields of inspiration are mainly science, psychology, philosophy and religions.
What is your work about?
Milena: The work is the result of what is outside :
the questions emerging from the world, beginning with Leibntz’s one :
“Why is there something rather than nothing?”
and with all its corollaries ; and what is inside, my deepest emotions, my fears, my angers, my joy and my despair.
The main topics of my work, in sl, are the collapse of humanism, and even humanity, the advanced civilization of trees and of course, the assumption that God could have been an alcoholic.
It is important to know I mix pictures and writing. I am not an artist, but a storyteller.
How is the artistic process like there? Do you see an object / person / landscape first and then the idea comes up? Or is it upside down?
Milena: There is no rule, but values : openness, liberty, humility.
Openness: welcoming what happens with no judgement, everything that happens is a gift.
That makes it possible to have a flow of ideas, of “possibles” with endless variations.
Liberty: I don’t care about academicism, fashion and style or failures.
Whatever comes and moves me is what i have to express. I test, fail and learn.
Humility: the less worse things I am creating are always totally unexpected, as if it appears in spite of me.
So it is useless to try to have any theory or identified process of creation.
The only thing I try to do is to take care of details, on the quality of the image or the story, as far as it is possible for me.
Your mantra?
Milena: “Every day is the best day of my life”.
Currently, the best place for you in SL?
Milena: Almost all my SL time is dedicated to my galleries and exhibitions.
Sometimes my avatar is parked in different clubs, like Fogbound or Exhale, listening to music, while working on the Adobe suite. The rest of my time I like to stay in the little home I’ve built with the few prims left, with one of my few friends I can talk to in full trust.
A question that moves you right now …
Milena: I am desperate by climate change and its denial by most of the humans.
I am horrified by violence and its media coverage which makes it trivial.
I see the future of our world as a choice between competition and cooperation.
For me the myth of paradise is the metaphor of our limited earth.
We have reached the wall of paradise, the limit of earth.
Competition is no more accurate, only cooperation will save life on our tiny earth.
It is what I wanted to express in my exhibition “American shot”.
As the result of this exhibition, an artist friend wrote to me accusing me of being “anti-american”, and irrespective of the people who saved Europe during WWII.
He brutally unfriended me, without listening to my explanations. He obviously didn’t see the exhibition. QED.
Is there a work of art in your life that particularly impressed you?
Milena: Some years ago, I had the privilege to see “La Nuit Étoilée” by Van Gogh in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was like a punch in my heart.
I stood gaping in front of this painting for I don’t know how long, drowned in the depth of this overwhelming blue of the sky. Some months later, I read in a book it was the first time a painter painted a galaxy in the sky.
Science inspires.
What is art for you – now completely independent of the usual definitions?
Milena: Art today has to question our way of thinking, of feeling, of living, of cheating, of loving…
Not because it has to be always, but today. Otherwise it is a decoration.
Having the possibility to create in this unstable and dangerous world incurs responsibility.
An artist will probably be the first to be jailed or killed in a totalitarian regime, and the temptation of totalitarianism was never so strong than today for the people in power.
Hanging an artwork in your lounge, has to enlighten your soul more than the color of your wall paper.
My favorite artist is Banksy.
Was there a key experience or has the artist profession always been your dearest wish?
Milena: I don’t see myself as an artist.
I chose not to embrace an artistic job in RL because it is not an occupation, but a calling.
“Nicht ein Beruf, aber eine Berufung”: not a job, a calling. A way of living. Or a way of surviving.
I was always a dreamer, probably due to the fact my birth was a seedy misunderstanding.
What drives you?
Milena: Everything I said before, and more. And coffee in the early morning.
Do you feel understood with your art?
Milena: This is an interesting question.
Sometimes I have the feeling that the more contemporary artist work is abstruse, the more it is considered as art.
Being understood sounds off-topic. I don’t really agree with this, but provoking reactions, feelings, emotions matters.
In addition, for me, the question is not to be understood but to bring out important questions for those who take the time to read my work.
Do you think that you can make a difference with your art?
Milena: It is a whole.
I do my best in my life to make the world better, for the family, friends, neighbors and citizens, not only with what I am doing in SL. I am clumsy, but try harder.
Do you think that everyone is an artist?
Milena: Looking attentively, every living being is an artwork. And also the little bug on my desk right now.
Do you have any role models? If yes, which?
Milena: Unfortunately, I admire people who live behind the scenes.
Simone Weil, the French philosopher, and Vivian Maier, the American photographer, for instance.
And they are far far above any possibility for me to reach their talent and thoughts.
They went in light, beyond the human cavern.
There were and still are people beyond humanity, anonymous persons, lost in their world.
If you can carefully open the door of their world, you can discover lights, smells, landscapes, music, dances that do not exist yet in our world, because our senses are mostly derisory.
What is your strength?
Milena: The ability to survive. I don’t let myself be pushed around, and I work hard.
What was the best advice you have ever received in SL?
Milena: Probably as many, the first person I met in SL said to me this short inequation I’ve always had in mind: “RL>SL”.
And I got some fantastic advice from SL developers to make E-Books in SL, to build my galleries, to fiddle with scripts, and even to be able to use BOM on my avi!
Your next projects, exhibitions. Where your art can be seen?
Milena: There are many projects at the moment. The exhibition Faded faces in New Berlin closes end of the May.
Work is in progress for three new exhibitions, and new ones are in the designing phase.
I will open two new Carbone Galleries, one this month, the other probably next month.
And my most thrilling project is to set up the Carbone Dance Company, a SL dance company for contemporary dance. After this, I plan to go to the beach for a while.
The Carbone Galleries are two art galleries showing my personal artworks, and also guest artists i like.
I made them with my hands and heart. The Carbone Gallery & The Carbone Gallery @Noir´Wen City
In both galleries, you have access to all my exhibitions in Second Life.
On May 27, 2021, Milena Carbone will open her third art gallery.
Installed on the private sim belonging to Charlie Nova, patron, it has the capacity for 3 to 4 exhibitions in an exceptionally natural and intimate landscape.
The gallery is made up of a reception building with an open and refined design in which you can have a drink and stroll, surrounded by works of art from Charlie Nova’s private collection. There is the exhibition board, common to all the Carbone Galleries from which you can access all her current exhibitions with 2 clicks.
The Carbone Gallery @ Serena will swiftly host three skybox exhibitions and one floor exhibition in the form of Landart, as well as events. Performances of the future Carbone Dance Company are already planned, including a contemporary ballet project written for excerpts from Richard Wagner’s opera mixed with the German metal band Rammstein.
More informations – The Carbone Gallery @ Serena Teleport
MILENA CARBONE – BIO
“Milena Carbone is French born in 1992 in Strasbourg.
She has written and photographed since the age of 16. In 2010, she entered university where she studied psychology.
In 2012, her life changed. She met the love of her life which only lasted forty days. She reads the IPCC reports and realizes the risk of the collapse of civilization, sacrificed on the altar of ignorance and greed.
In 2013, she cut short her studies, and did an accelerated course in computer graphics.
She worked for two years in an advertising agency, and in 2015 started out as a freelance graphic designer.
Between 2017 and 2019, artist friends encouraged her to publish her texts and to exhibit her photographs.
She participated in two exhibitions of artists’ collectives where she presented photographs associated with short stories.
In mid 2019, she signed up for Second Life.
She discovered its artistic potential and since then has devoted all her free time to creation, associating, as in real life, images and texts.
Milena Carbone is a fiction in which, as in any artistic work, biographical and imaginary elements are mixed.“
MILENA CARBONE’S ARTISTIC PROJECT IN SECOND LIFE
Milena Carbone’s artistic project on Second Life is the continuation of her work in RL. Its specificity is based on anonymity, an important component of this virtual world.
By accepting the rule of the “double” (the real “I” and the virtual “I”), Milena Carbone includes herself in her artwork : she is fiction and questions her place in the world and the scope of her word.
By asking the question: “Who speaks in Second Life?”, Milena Carbone, author and fiction, returns this question to us in our real life: Who speaks ? How and why is it that an “I” appears capable of observing, from the inside, the universe that created it ? How can we ignore our ignorance to the point of destroying ourselves ? How does our language, limited and discontinuous, lose us in sufficiency?
Her creative process is iterative: some of her images inspire her stories and these stories modify the development of the image, which itself transforms the story.
The phase of editing is very important. It combines the raw image of Second Life with a black and white layer and textures. These different photoshop layers represent, for Milena Carbone, “layers of meaning”.
THE RECURRING THEMES IN MILENA CARBONE’S WORK
Her main themes are:
- The collapse of humanism, and even humanity;
- Fiction, reality and consciousness
- Poetry of science and spirituality;
- The advanced civilization of trees;
- The assumption that God could have been an alcoholic.
To feed her artistic project, she draws inspiration from science, psychology, philosophy and religions.
Her favorite subjects are female avatars and / or natural or urban landscapes. She rarely takes herself as the subject of her images preferring to discover model avatars with attitude.
MILENA CARBONE´S UPCOMING PROJECTS
Fragments, an exhibition by Melusina Parkin
In the coming weeks, an exhibition of works by Melusina Parkin, ‘Fragments’, will be open at the Galerie Carbone @ Serena, with texts and an installation created by Milena Carbone.
Arts & rats, in association with Bryn Oh
Accepting an invitation from a friend to exhibit in his castle, under a XIXth century glass roof, MIlena Carbone is currently exhibiting 9 works from her Arts & Rats exhibition. On the occasion of this creation, Bryn Oh lent her formidable series of mythical creatures. Each painting contains a combination of its creatures.
Milena Carbone is launching her Carbone Dance Company, a contemporary dance company. After her first ballet, Scandal, which was very successful with spectators, she devoted a lot of energy to the creation of a new ballet which will be performed as part of the exhibition Fragment, by Melusina Parkin with music by Steve Reich and a booklet from texts written for the exhibition.
The dance company will also produce micro-choreographies of around 5 to 10 minutes presented in a loop for several hours. Visitors to the gallery can enjoy them whenever they want. Called “Living PIctures”, the staging of these choreographies is expressed in a frame that resembles a large painting, in front of a video background. Living Pictures # 01 and # 02 have already been featured in the main Carbone Gallery.
WHERE TO FIND MILENA CARBONE’S ARTWORK
Milena Carbone has her own art galleries : The Carbone Gallery, which shows her exhibitions and guest artists.
The Carbone Gallery – The Carbone Gallery @ Noir´Wen City – The Carbone Gallery @ Serena
The Carbone Gallery Group – Milena Carbone Flickr – Milena Carbone Writings on Medium
From the very first day I saw Milena’s work I knew she was an exceptional Artist. I started to follow her and we became friends.I learned that she is multi talented, photographing, video, photoshop.., and now combining it al with dance.
I dare to say that (as all great artist do) Milena changed my Second Life. From hopping from pose ball to pose ball -sometimes even for dancing :)- to an art lover enjoying the beauty of SL in art, in building and sculpting.
Please support slartists as the amount of work they put into it is the same as an artwork would require in RL whilst the lindens are…, wel you know.
Milena thank you for giving my sLife a new meaning.