Started making Jewellery in his teens learning from master craftsmen in Brazil and Italy. He later completed his training as a goldsmith in 1989. Curious about the Contemporary Jewellery phenomenon, he made his way to Cologne, to study with Prof. Skubic and later enrolled at the Royal College of Art, London under Prof. Watkins, where he completed his Masters’ degree in 1998.
In 1999 he founded Postcon which remains active in promoting ‘Post-Contemporary Jewellery’ and other far-fetched ideas. Some are contained in Manuel’s book Do you speak Jewellery?© (1998), a seminal text for Contemporary Jewellery theory. In 2015 he opens “The Postcon Project”, an Arts education school, in Austria.
He has taught extensively at jewellery related institutions around the world, including the Royal College of Art, Hiko Mizuno Jewellery College, Tokyo; Silpakorn University, Bangkok; AR.CO school, Lisbon, the Shenkar College in Tel-Aviv and the Alchimia School, Florence,where he was senior lecturer for six years. He was workshop leader at the Salzburg Summer Academy for two years and held a Professorship at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts for four years.
His artwork can be seen in several books on Contemporary Jewellery. The work is also present in some public and private collections, including that of the Danner Rotunde, Munich and that of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
He practises worldwide aiming at developing the creative potential of people through the arts.
