GISELLE MANZANO RAMIREZ

Giselle Manzano Ramirez is a Colombian multidisciplinary designer and artist based in New York. Her work explores the intersection of art, fashion, and healing.

Drawing from her background in graphic design, printmaking, and fashion, Giselle has discovered a powerful medium of self-expression in textile art. She seeks to elevate everyday, mundane objects by infusing them with symbolic meaning. Through textile design and printmaking, she creates art that bridges the existential and the spiritual, imbuing each piece with deep personal significance.

Her creative process incorporates unconventional printmaking techniques and nontraditional materials, including rust, reverse dyeing, deconstruction, and various textile manipulations. By transforming discarded textiles and ordinary objects, she encourages an intimate engagement with her environment. Her work often takes two-dimensional textiles and transforms them into three-dimensional forms, merging fashion, textile art, sculpture, installation, and performance.

Giselle’s practice is deeply autobiographical, serving as a personal healing journey that translates her life experiences into tangible expressions. It becomes a vessel for storytelling, embodiment, and integration, as she explores themes of confronting and transforming pain, reclaiming autonomy, and finding true healing. Her work emphasizes the importance of embracing all parts of ourselves—uncovering the unconscious and bringing hidden aspects into the light.

Her art invites viewers to embrace the beauty of imperfection, opening up conversations about compassion, vulnerability, and self-acceptance. By reimagining the embodiment of fashion and textiles beyond mere wearability, she blurs the boundaries between creator and creation. Through performance art and installation, Giselle integrates herself into her work, embodying her concepts and transforming the creative process into a visceral, healing experience. Wearing and performing her creations enables her to release stored emotions and connect deeply with her own healing process.

Ultimately, Giselle’s work serves as a tool for spiritual exploration and renewal. She aims to inspire others to embark on their own healing journeys through the sacred process of art.

EARTHWORKS

Earthworks is collaboratively imagined by multidisciplinary artists Cristina Bartley Dominguez and Catherine Chen who explore rites, ritual spaces, and ancestral knowledge. Through their incorporated practice of image-making, movement, sound, text, and installation, they create performance-based works that address the natures of catastrophe and mythology, belonging and inheritance. By bridging their Mexican and Taiwanese ancestries, they integrate folklore, somatic ritual, and pre-colonial modes of storytelling to unearth the relationship between memory, movement, and land, imagining survival strategies that will aid all forms of life in our intimate, yet catastrophic worlds.

GATELESS II

In ‘GATELESS II’ by Giselle x Earthworks, the audiences embarked on a transformative odyssey into the realm of human emotion and spirituality. The performance compelled us to reevaluate our identities, transcending past grievances and guiding us towards introspection and self-discovery.

The harmonious fusion of movement, sound, sculpture and textile art, crafted an emotional sanctuary, where themes of forgiveness and the liberating act of letting go were explored, shedding the weight of grudges. It was a poignant reminder of the emotional baggage we carry and the freedom discovered through forgiveness.

This performance extended a heartfelt invitation to explore the healing power of art, bridging the worlds of fashion, art, and design to create a profound narrative that resonated with transformation and meaning.