MANTO DE REPARACION

Manto de Reparación

 — Curatorial text by Carolina Arévalo

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Maite Izquierdo’s work embraces space, creating tactile and sensorial environments that invite people to immerse themselves in a synesthetic experience — relational in scale and deeply chromatic.

Over more than twenty years of practice, both in her installations and architectural commissions, Izquierdo has produced works that unavoidably engage the body.

From the street, a textile mantle of multiple colors overflows from the gallery window, emitting a pulsating light from within. Upon entering, visitors step into a membrane that embraces and redefines the west hall — a landscape that softly gathers diverse chromaticities.

After an introspective process with her own body — intensified by the isolation and distancing of all bodies during the pandemic — she presented Corambre (2022), where she recognized a collective need to touch, but also a personal urge to mend a torn social fabric, fractured communities, and often-dissociated individualities.

Through textile practice — now open to collective making — Manto de Reparación emerges at Sala Gasco, in the heart of Santiago: a new collective work built through the assemblage of different identities and places in the city, stitching together textile remnants as a means of expression, entanglement, and repair of the social fabric.

Although this metaphor has been evoked by many thinkers, here it refers not to the horizontal and vertical structure of weaving, but to the organic joining of unique parts into a skin that heals. The overlock machine unites dissimilar fabrics, releasing an excess — just as scars unite broken tissues, shedding the dead skin to rebuild a new body.

The artist convened over 170 people, in twenty groups of about ten each, for two sessions of reciprocal artistic practice: while participants collaborated in creating the mantle, the artist taught them to sew with the overlock machine.

At the beginning of the first session, Izquierdo led a brief silent meditation on bodily awareness, grounding attention in the present moment. She then invited participants to touch a pile of discarded retail garments and choose one. In the context of fast fashion — and recognizing the fashion industry’s impact on the climate crisis — it is significant that these clothes are new but have defects, or “wounds,” that prevent them from being sold.

Recovered by Banco de Ropa Foundation, these garments provided the material basis of the work. The act of sewing thus becomes a symbolic gesture of repair and re-signification.

 

The artist writes:

To be mysteriously chosen by a color.

To have to cut so that another may fit.

To learn to baste with patience.

To trust a fragile thread.

To treat remnants, cast-offs, vestiges with reverence.

Today they become an offering.

To sew a mantle that may shelter others.

To form a body from diversity.

 

Each person began cutting the garment from its “wound,” separating its structure — seams, buttons, labels, zippers — without cutting the fabric itself: to cut and to hold. This exercise of selection, dissection, and recomposition operated on many levels. The parts were detached, leaving behind a structure stripped of its content.

The term habit — referring both to clothing and routine — becomes central to this exploration: shedding a habit also means transformation.

Collectively, the pieces were laid out on the floor to be understood as a whole, visualizing cuts and joins. Garments that once covered three-dimensional bodies were translated into two-dimensional planes — deconstructing unity to relate with others. The process was a learning through unmaking.

Each person kept one part and shared others in reciprocal exchange, guided by the artist — an act of giving and receiving within the group. Everyone re-composed their own mantle by sewing together the pieces gathered from others, thus weaving an individual work born from the collective.

The artwork fosters horizontal relationships among people through a practice that remains open, enabling sensitive experiences in multiple ways — through touch, color, sound, and word. There is something synergic in being present with others: artistic practice, particularly among women, facilitates dialogue and revitalizes memory, offering space for transformative and everyday interactions alike.

In the second session, Izquierdo guided a meditation in motion — a dynamic exercise to recognize the pulse of the body in that place and moment. The conversation turned toward processes of repair, translated into red stitching as scar. The artist explained the technical use of the overlock machine, and the practice began.

The noise dictated a collective yet individual rhythm. Each person sewed their own mantle; the hum of the machines became overwhelming. Then, each mantle was joined to the next, one by one, stretching into a common fabric. They extended it on the floor, contemplating the work accomplished — a whole formed by a constellation of colors and rhythms.

The artist conducted twenty workshops and later joined all these unique mantles. Different materials reacted in distinct ways; Izquierdo was surprised by how easily concavities and elasticities fit together as she articulated an extensive universe that is simultaneously body and space. Finally, she sewed fifty-six meters of red edge to sustain the multiplicity of weights and textures, closing this vast and versatile work that inhabits and adheres to the gallery.

Inside it lies Recuento Textil, a nine-channel video installation showing — in its own simultaneous rhythms — fragments from different moments of the collective textile creation, recorded by Victoria Jensen. The videos form an archive that endlessly re-creates itself through the varied duration of each unique sequence.

From the textile’s gaze, through the juxtaposition of hands, threads, colors, and assemblages, they merge into rhythmic overlays, becoming another organism.

In the east hall, the series Estructuras hangs as situated bodies interacting with the space and natural light. Suspended from seven hooks reminiscent of those once used in slaughterhouses — recalling a work the artist created a decade earlier in Santiago’s Franklin district — they now outline the volume of a body shaped by many others.

The structures contain only emptiness, but through their overlapping, translucent and languid, they accumulate and flesh out presence, humanizing and reconfiguring seriality in reorderings of color. Their anthropomorphic quality establishes a personal relation between the viewer’s own body and the work.

On the adjacent wall hang Hilachas I and Hilachas II, two bidimensional works that gather, as an archaeology, the leftover threads from the process — traces or evidence of color as a persistent vector in Izquierdo’s practice.

Finally, Cordón descends from the ceiling, amalgamating the excesses of the mantle’s red seams. The title is descriptive and recalls the initial line that articulates and supports the body of work, counterbalancing the structural column that anchors the room.

Community art refers to artistic practices that involve multiple people, agents, and communities — fostering interaction, dialogue, and aesthetic experiences where process defines contemporaneity.

Manto de Reparación joins a genealogy of artistic practices that question traditional hierarchies of art and reclaim those categorized as feminine or domestic — as both political and affective gestures.

In Izquierdo’s work, repair is not only material, but also bodily, collective, and symbolic. It is a practice that reconstructs what is fragmented without erasing its scars, allowing memory, the body, and the people of a city to encounter one another in a new interweaving of possibilities.

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