Patchwork and heat-molded methacrylate.
Composition of four pieces:
· Patchwork / Methacrylate 1: 1.25 × 75 × 84 cm //
· Patchwork / Methacrylate 2: 1.12 × 97 × 65 cm
· Methacrylate Box “Boot”: 33 × 33 × 8 cm //
· Methacrylate Box “Bag”: 29 × 25 × 6 cm
TEXTILE CREATURES // 2025
Fashion, beyond its utilitarian function, is a language laden with cultural, emotional, and political meanings.
This project claims its artistic dimension through the creation of textile pieces that transcend commercial boundaries and address issues such as identity, memory, finitude, and gender. Inspired by theories from Foucault, Barthes, and Lipovetsky, as well as practices by artists like Mario Espliego and Martin Margiela, the work explores clothing as a corporeal archive: vintage garments—mainly discarded men’s suits—preserving traces of past lives and obsolete power systems. Through techniques of patchwork and deconstruction, “textile creatures” emerge to reveal the hidden: open seams, intervened linings, worn fabrics.
The question, “How would you dress if you knew you were going to die today?” guides the process, proposing clothing not as a social disguise, but as a second skin revealing our deepest truth. Thus, the project proposes a deconstruction of gender in clothing, dissolving binary boundaries and questioning the performativity of dressing. Masculine and feminine aspects are merged, undone, and reformulated into hybrid pieces that challenge hierarchies of gender, class, and consumption. Death, understood as a democratizing phenomenon, permeates the entire work: fabrics become textile memento mori that celebrate the imperfect and the ephemeral. In contrast to fast fashion and digital dematerialization, this project offers a tactile and slow approach, where the garments’ scars address the viewer directly. Ultimately, it is not about dressing bodies, but about questioning them. The resulting pieces are sensitive maps of individual and
collective memories that celebrate the beauty of fragility, wear, and lived experience.
Madrid, 2025
Composition of four pieces:
· Patchwork / Methacrylate 1: 1.25 × 75 × 84 cm //
· Patchwork / Methacrylate 2: 1.12 × 97 × 65 cm
· Methacrylate Box “Boot”: 33 × 33 × 8 cm //
· Methacrylate Box “Bag”: 29 × 25 × 6 cm
TEXTILE CREATURES // 2025
Fashion, beyond its utilitarian function, is a language laden with cultural, emotional, and political meanings.
This project claims its artistic dimension through the creation of textile pieces that transcend commercial boundaries and address issues such as identity, memory, finitude, and gender. Inspired by theories from Foucault, Barthes, and Lipovetsky, as well as practices by artists like Mario Espliego and Martin Margiela, the work explores clothing as a corporeal archive: vintage garments—mainly discarded men’s suits—preserving traces of past lives and obsolete power systems. Through techniques of patchwork and deconstruction, “textile creatures” emerge to reveal the hidden: open seams, intervened linings, worn fabrics.
The question, “How would you dress if you knew you were going to die today?” guides the process, proposing clothing not as a social disguise, but as a second skin revealing our deepest truth. Thus, the project proposes a deconstruction of gender in clothing, dissolving binary boundaries and questioning the performativity of dressing. Masculine and feminine aspects are merged, undone, and reformulated into hybrid pieces that challenge hierarchies of gender, class, and consumption. Death, understood as a democratizing phenomenon, permeates the entire work: fabrics become textile memento mori that celebrate the imperfect and the ephemeral. In contrast to fast fashion and digital dematerialization, this project offers a tactile and slow approach, where the garments’ scars address the viewer directly. Ultimately, it is not about dressing bodies, but about questioning them. The resulting pieces are sensitive maps of individual and
collective memories that celebrate the beauty of fragility, wear, and lived experience.
Madrid, 2025
Disección textil de un bolso vintage en caja de metacrilato
· Caja metacrilato bota: 79 × 34 × 6 cm
Madrid, 2025
Disección textil de una bota vintage en caja de metacrilato
· Caja metacrilato bota: 33 × 33 × 8 cm
Madrid, 2025
Disección textil de un bolso vintage en caja de metacrilato
· Caja metacrilato bota: 29 × 25 × 6 cm
Madrid, 2025
Patchwork textil y metacrilato modelado por calor.
· Patchwork / metacrilato 2: 1,12 × 97 × 65 cm
Madrid, 2025
Patchwork textil y metacrilato modelado por calor.
· Patchwork / metacrilato 1: 1,25 × 75 × 84 cm
Madrid, 2025
Sculptural installation: Beyond the Void.
Textile patchwork on felt base. Composition of five pieces:
· Patchwork 3: 167 × 104 × 0.5 cm
· Patchwork 4: 201 × 94 × 0.5 cm
· Patchwork 1: 167 x 104 × 0,5 cm
· Patchwork 4: 201 x 94 × 0,5 cm
· Patchwork 4: 152 × 124 × 0,5 cm
BEYOND THE VOID // 2024
The project Beyond the Void was born from a deeply personal experience: the premature loss of my father, a sculptor whose life was marked by dedication to art as well as by the frustration of not achieving the recognition he longed for. This painful episode initially led me to reject art as a vocation. However, over time, it inspired a reflection on the social pressures that drive individuals to pursue external ideals of success, often causing alienation and denial of one’s own identity.
The work explores the tension between authenticity and conformity, questioning the social norms that dictate how we should be. In this sense, clothing serves as a central metaphor: garments function as a nonverbal language and reflect fragmented identities—layers adopted to fit into various contexts. These masks can distance the individual from their essence, accumulating fictions that conceal true identity.
Beyond the Void offers an introspective refuge—a space where social conventions dissolve and reconciliation with one’s own light and shadows becomes possible. The installation comprises two main elements: a fabric made of overlapping, deconstructed garments in patchwork form, symbolizing the multiple roles we assume; and liquid sculptures—abstract resin stains with glossy finishes—that defy rigid standards.
This work is intrinsically connected to my love for clothing and its significance. Each used garment is more than just fabric; it represents memory and lived experience. By collecting old garments, especially those laden with history and emotion, I seek to bring together different origins and meanings, constructing pieces that reveal both visible and hidden aspects within ourselves.
Beyond the Void celebrates individual uniqueness, using art as a tool to question imposed narratives and to propose a space where fragmented identities might be reconciled toward wholeness.
Málaga, 2024.
Textile patchwork on felt base. Composition of five pieces:
· Patchwork 3: 167 × 104 × 0.5 cm
· Patchwork 4: 201 × 94 × 0.5 cm
· Patchwork 1: 167 x 104 × 0,5 cm
· Patchwork 4: 201 x 94 × 0,5 cm
· Patchwork 4: 152 × 124 × 0,5 cm
BEYOND THE VOID // 2024
The project Beyond the Void was born from a deeply personal experience: the premature loss of my father, a sculptor whose life was marked by dedication to art as well as by the frustration of not achieving the recognition he longed for. This painful episode initially led me to reject art as a vocation. However, over time, it inspired a reflection on the social pressures that drive individuals to pursue external ideals of success, often causing alienation and denial of one’s own identity.
The work explores the tension between authenticity and conformity, questioning the social norms that dictate how we should be. In this sense, clothing serves as a central metaphor: garments function as a nonverbal language and reflect fragmented identities—layers adopted to fit into various contexts. These masks can distance the individual from their essence, accumulating fictions that conceal true identity.
Beyond the Void offers an introspective refuge—a space where social conventions dissolve and reconciliation with one’s own light and shadows becomes possible. The installation comprises two main elements: a fabric made of overlapping, deconstructed garments in patchwork form, symbolizing the multiple roles we assume; and liquid sculptures—abstract resin stains with glossy finishes—that defy rigid standards.
This work is intrinsically connected to my love for clothing and its significance. Each used garment is more than just fabric; it represents memory and lived experience. By collecting old garments, especially those laden with history and emotion, I seek to bring together different origins and meanings, constructing pieces that reveal both visible and hidden aspects within ourselves.
Beyond the Void celebrates individual uniqueness, using art as a tool to question imposed narratives and to propose a space where fragmented identities might be reconciled toward wholeness.
Málaga, 2024.
Instalación con piezas de patchwork textil.
Madrid, 2025
·Patchwork confeccionado con tejidos mixtos sobre fieltro
soporte: 33 × 33 × 8 cm
Madrid, 2025
·Patchwork confeccionado con tejidos mixtos sobre fieltro
soporte: 196 x 59 cm
Madrid, 2025
·Patchwork confeccionado con tejidos mixtos sobre fieltro
soporte: 167 x 104 cm
Madrid, 2025
·Patchwork confeccionado con tejidos mixtos sobre fieltro
soporte: 201 x 94 cm
Madrid, 2025
·Patchwork confeccionado con tejidos mixtos sobre fieltro
soporte: 181 x 145 cm
Madrid, 2025
Collage made from multiple patterns. Series of 5 collages:
· Extended Pattern 1: 160 × 140 cm
· Extended Pattern 1: 160 × 140 cm
Extended Patterns // 2024
The expanded patterns I present initially emerged as the foundation for the acrylic silhouettes of my textile sculptures, within the textile creatures process. Inspired by the fragmentation and recomposition of garment templates found in magazines like Burda, these hybrid patterns soon ceased to follow the logic of a functional body and acquired a symbolic presence of their own.
As the project evolved, the patterns grew and eventually emancipated themselves from the strictly sculptural field, becoming autonomous works —interdependent, yet with singular value.
This process resonates both formally and conceptually with Daniel Libeskind’s “impossible plans” for the Jewish Museum in Berlin: as in his architecture, fragmentation, displacement and absence articulate a memory of what is lost and what cannot be represented.
Thus, my patterns do not aim for utility or symmetry. Instead, they map hidden relationships, absent bodies and displaced subjectivities, generating a textile spatiality that functions as a sensitive archive.
While some still dialogue with the acrylic sculptures —whose structures resemble transparent hangers holding the material memory of multiple lives— I am currently exploring the expanded patterns as independent pieces, capable of containing that emotional Frankenstein: assemblages of memories, gestures and fragments of identity sewn from absence. Each one proposes an impossible surface, like an affective map or architectural plan where the textile speaks both of what is visible and what remains hidden.
Madrid, 2024.
· Extended Pattern 1: 160 × 140 cm
· Extended Pattern 1: 160 × 140 cm
Extended Patterns // 2024
The expanded patterns I present initially emerged as the foundation for the acrylic silhouettes of my textile sculptures, within the textile creatures process. Inspired by the fragmentation and recomposition of garment templates found in magazines like Burda, these hybrid patterns soon ceased to follow the logic of a functional body and acquired a symbolic presence of their own.
As the project evolved, the patterns grew and eventually emancipated themselves from the strictly sculptural field, becoming autonomous works —interdependent, yet with singular value.
This process resonates both formally and conceptually with Daniel Libeskind’s “impossible plans” for the Jewish Museum in Berlin: as in his architecture, fragmentation, displacement and absence articulate a memory of what is lost and what cannot be represented.
Thus, my patterns do not aim for utility or symmetry. Instead, they map hidden relationships, absent bodies and displaced subjectivities, generating a textile spatiality that functions as a sensitive archive.
While some still dialogue with the acrylic sculptures —whose structures resemble transparent hangers holding the material memory of multiple lives— I am currently exploring the expanded patterns as independent pieces, capable of containing that emotional Frankenstein: assemblages of memories, gestures and fragments of identity sewn from absence. Each one proposes an impossible surface, like an affective map or architectural plan where the textile speaks both of what is visible and what remains hidden.
Madrid, 2024.
Collection of 50 collages in mixed media.
·Collage and mixed markers on paper: 21 × 29 cm.
50 Drawings // 2024
This series of fifty drawings stems from a persistent image that, rather than a memory, has become a daily presence. The scene comes from Villaverde, in the south of Madrid — a place marked by contrasts: accessible housing, but also areas shaped by vulnerability. There, the figure of young people struggling with drug addiction, particularly affected by fentanyl use, has become a common sight. Bodies frozen in poses that defy logic, suspended in a kind of trance that seems to lift them off the ground, detached from the rhythm of the world.
These images, unsettling yet deeply human, triggered in me a need for representation that did not pass through photography. I felt that photographing them would be a form of intrusion, a way of turning their fragility into spectacle. I chose drawing as a medium to approach the scene without invading it — to translate a physical impression into a line, a blot, an obsessive repetition.
Each drawing is a variation on the same pose, a suspended gesture, a formal exploration that becomes an attempt at understanding. The repetition of the line does not aim for accuracy, but for resonance — a way of approaching that reality without judgment, of holding the gaze on what we are socially trained to ignore.
Through drawing, I find a way to dignify that presence, to make visible what daily life erases or normalizes. What remains is the question of that humanity crouched at the margins, and the desire to look at it with care.
Madrid, 2024.
·Collage and mixed markers on paper: 21 × 29 cm.
50 Drawings // 2024
This series of fifty drawings stems from a persistent image that, rather than a memory, has become a daily presence. The scene comes from Villaverde, in the south of Madrid — a place marked by contrasts: accessible housing, but also areas shaped by vulnerability. There, the figure of young people struggling with drug addiction, particularly affected by fentanyl use, has become a common sight. Bodies frozen in poses that defy logic, suspended in a kind of trance that seems to lift them off the ground, detached from the rhythm of the world.
These images, unsettling yet deeply human, triggered in me a need for representation that did not pass through photography. I felt that photographing them would be a form of intrusion, a way of turning their fragility into spectacle. I chose drawing as a medium to approach the scene without invading it — to translate a physical impression into a line, a blot, an obsessive repetition.
Each drawing is a variation on the same pose, a suspended gesture, a formal exploration that becomes an attempt at understanding. The repetition of the line does not aim for accuracy, but for resonance — a way of approaching that reality without judgment, of holding the gaze on what we are socially trained to ignore.
Through drawing, I find a way to dignify that presence, to make visible what daily life erases or normalizes. What remains is the question of that humanity crouched at the margins, and the desire to look at it with care.
Madrid, 2024.
No one shouldn't hide
who they truly are // 2025
This video begins with a seemingly simple question:
How would you dress if you knew today was the day you die?
This question serves as a critical trigger to explore the political dimension of dress, understanding clothing as an extension of social control mechanisms.
Inspired by Michel Foucault, the project highlights how dress codes internalize norms that discipline the body, even in moments as intimate as death.
The piece contrasts two gestures: the choice of soft, delicate lingerie versus the rigidity of a formal jacket. It’s not about disguise or provocation, but about revealing how desire collides with social norms. The camera focuses on minimal gestures: a hesitant hand, an overly tight tie, the texture of lace on skin. These small acts, far from anecdotal, become micro-resistances against imposed expectations.
The materials —lace, wool, heavy fabric— operate as metaphors. The soft becomes resistance; the rigid, imposition. Dressing, in this context, is not about covering but about positioning oneself. And at the threshold marked by death, every chosen garment becomes a way of saying who one is — or who one has decided to stop being.
LINK:
https://youtu.be/_LeaBNrUJn4?si=45ZdfORbXNiIAaab
Who Do You Dress For? // 2025
This piece reflects on the power dynamics embedded in the act of getting dressed. Clothing is never neutral: every garment carries symbolic weight, a system of codes that shapes how we present ourselves to others. From uniforms to everyday attire, dressing implies responding —consciously or not— to a set of social expectations. What we choose to wear can be a way to conform, to obey, or to rebel, depending on the context, gender, or identity of the wearer.
The central question of the work is both direct and revealing: Who do you dress for?
It encapsulates the tension between what we show and what we hide, between what we wish to express and what we are expected to communicate. Do we dress to meet external judgment or to respond to an internal drive? Who validates what we wear? The piece doesn’t offer clear answers but opens a space to inhabit that ambiguity.
Beyond the question, a lingering doubt remains: Do we really care?
Perhaps the most radical gesture is not to respond with certainty, but to allow ourselves to hesitate. Maybe that crack —between who we are and what we show— is also a possible place from which to rethink how we inhabit the world.
LINK:
https://youtu.be/me1B-7sPt-Q?si=7vTLut8lQ8Opwfwc
Manu Olarte
manuelolartegarcia@gmail.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/manu.olarte.11/
I work with second-hand garments and patchwork techniques to build textile sculptures that function as emotional archives and fragmented bodies. Through these assemblages, I explore the relationship between identity, memory, and clothing, revealing the poetic and political dimensions of fabric as a vessel for lived stories. My practice combines the visual with the visceral, the aesthetic with the affective, to address questions about who we are and how we inhabit our bodies through what we wear.
Exhibitions
ENCONTROS DE ARTISTAS NOVOS #15
August 24–28, 2025
Cidade da Cultura, Santiago de Compostela, Galicia.
NOVUS
May 24 – July 19, 2025
Galería Espacio Mínimo
Madrid
VISIONES
June 26 – July 26, 2025
Vicerectorado de Cultura, Universidad de Málaga
Málaga
Academic Achievements
2024 – 2025
Master’s Degree in Research and Artistic Creation (MIAC)
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
2022 – 2024
Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts
Universidad de Málaga
2002 – 2006
Four academic years in Fine Arts
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
1999 – 2002
Second-year studies in Film Directing
Escuela Universitaria de Artes y Espectáculos TAI, Madrid