Biography

Miguel Peñaranda Olmeda is a Spanish, Brussels-based visual artist, performer, writer, and costume designer. While rooted in personal accounts, his work aims for collective resonance, creating spaces of shared reflection through performance and installation, delving into notions of patriarchal power, masculinity and structural violence.

Drawing from political, factual, and historical narratives, Miguel treats his body as object, subject, and performer, seeking direct interaction and participation from the spectator. Inspired by the ordinary, his process values repetition, slowness, and quiet fragility, cultivating poetic catharsis through distilled material and gestural actions. Textile craftsmanship and the repurposing of materials play a central role in his installations, linking the tactile to broader themes of grief, power, and transformation.

His current research expands toward the idea of “negative spaces”— that is, the void (immaterial or physical) as a constitutive grounds for meaning. Through this theme, his work proposes new ways of imagining presence, autonomy, and collective connection within and beyond institutional frameworks.

Artistic project

This participatory, performance project explores how political and economical power reshapes language into a mediatised tool of influence. It offers the collective possibility of temporarily owning words and create metaphors that reinterpret our role as citizens. 

When language is so manipulated, words become potential weapons and their metaphors silent tools that divide public life.

In this performance, language becomes both material and force: something that can cling to the body, burden it, or attempt to define it. The piece considers the human body as a vulnerable site where public discourse lands and settles. It asks how individuals become carriers of imposed narratives, and how language, when manipulated, can immobilize both personal and collective agency. 

The performance opens a participatory space inviting the audience to reflect and act upon the possibility of reclaiming metaphors as a shared cultural resource –something porous, alive, and collectively shaped. By revealing the fragility and weight of the system that surround us, the work challenges viewers to consider their own role in reinterpreting, contesting, and reshaping the language that circulates through contemporary political life.

Format: durational participatory performance 

Size of audience: max of 20/25 participants; or more if taking turns.

Specific location: most likely indoors as of now - outdoors at a later stage 

Timing/duration: up to 4 hours at the moment